“My God! I have often regretted that I was born! I have often wished to fall back even into nothingness, rather than advance through so many falsehoods, so many sufferings, and so many successive losses, towards that loss of ourselves which we call death!”

Original: Mon Dieu! J'ai souvent regretté d'être né! J'ai souvent souhaité retomber même dans le néant, plutôt que d'avancer à travers tant de mensonges, tant de souffrances et tant de pertes successives, vers cette perte de nous-mêmes que nous appelons la mort! — An honest cry of existential weariness that still affirms the value of family bonds and simple affections. · Les Confidences, 1849 (French)

• Death
• Family
• Suffering

“History teaches everything, even the future.”

Original: L'histoire apprend tout, même l'avenir. — Pairs with his remark on experience as prophecy, treating the past as a reliable teacher of what lies ahead. · Speech at Mâcon, 1847 (commonly attributed; French)

• Future
• History
• Wisdom

“I was the first to bring poetry down from Parnassus and to give what was called the Muse, instead of a conventional seven-stringed lyre, the very fibres of the human heart, touched and moved by the innumerable thrills of the soul and of nature.”

Original: Je suis le premier qui ai fait descendre la poésie du Parnasse, et qui ai donné à ce qu'on nommait la muse, au lieu d’une lyre à sept cordes de convention, les fibres mêmes du cœur de l’homme, touchées et émues par les innombrables frissons de l’âme et de la nature. — Lamartine claims to have personalised French poetry by grounding it in authentic human feeling rather than classical c… · Preface to the Méditations poétiques, 2 July 1849 (French)

• Authenticity
• Heart
• Poetry