Literary Birthday – 24 July – Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was born on 24 July 1802 and died on 5 December 1870.

Alexandre Dumas Quotes

1. Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.
2. One’s work may be finished someday, but one’s education never.
3. Infatuated, half through conceit, half through love of my art, I achieve the impossible working as no one else ever works.
4. There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
5. There are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.
6. In business, sir, one has no friends, only correspondents.
7. Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.
8. As a general rule…people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.
9. The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.
10. There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body’s sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever.
11. True love always makes a man better, no matter what woman inspires it.
12. Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels bound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum, even when they are gilded.

Alexandre Dumas was a French novelist and playwright whose thrilling historical adventures made him one of the most popular and prolific authors of the 19th century. Best known for classics such as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, Dumas captivated readers with his vivid characters, dramatic plots, and tales of revenge, loyalty, and heroism. He began his literary career as a playwright, with his early works achieving immediate success. In the 1840s, he founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris, a venue dedicated to producing historical dramas. Throughout his career, Dumas wrote across a wide range of genres and published around 100,000 pages during his lifetime. His memoirs, My Memoirs, offer a fascinating glimpse into French literary society and the vibrant cultural world of the Romantic period.

Source for Image: Nadar, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson
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