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‘The king! I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don’t kill a man, you remove an obstacle, that’s all.
‘For, in simple and permitted matters, our natural appetites warn us not to exceed the boundaries of what is permissible for us.
It is not the laws of society that condemn murder, but the laws of nature.’
Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge. My captivity concentrated all my faculties on a single point. They had previously been dispersed, now they clashed in a narrow space; and, as you know, the clash of clouds produces electricity, electricity produces lightning and lightning gives light.’
Justice has dark and mysterious ways which are hard to fathom.
‘I regret having helped you in your investigation and said what I did to you,’ he remarked. ‘Why is that?’ Dantès asked. ‘Because I have insinuated a feeling into your heart that was not previously there: the desire for revenge.’
Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.’
At your age, you have faith in life; it is a privilege of youth to believe and to hope. But old men see death more clearly. Here it is! It is coming … it is the end
The heart breaks when it has swelled too much in the warm breath of hope, then finds itself enclosed in cold reality.
‘Be happy, noble heart. Be blessed for all the good you have done and will yet do. Let my gratitude remain hidden in the shadows like your good deeds.’
‘And now,’ said the stranger, ‘farewell, goodness, humanity, gratitude … Farewell all those feelings that nourish and illuminate the heart! I have taken the place of Providence to reward the good; now let the avenging God make way for me to punish the wrongdoer!’
In every country where independence takes the place of liberty, the first need felt by any strong mind and powerful constitution is to possess a weapon which can serve both for attack and defence; and which, by making its bearer formidable, will mean that he often inspires dread.
Hatred is blind and anger deaf: the one who pours himself a cup of vengeance is likely to drink a bitter draught.’
On the first step of the scaffold, death tears away the mask that one has worn all one’s life and the true face appears.
‘Don’t hope too much, Bertuccio,’ said the count. ‘The wicked do not die in that way: God seems to take them under his protection to use them as the instruments of his vengeance.’
There are two medicines for all ills: time and silence.
I have only two enemies: I shall not say two conquerors, because with persistence I can make them bow to my will: they are distance and time.
‘Come, come. Enough of poison. Now that my heart is full of it, let us go and find the antidote.’
‘Youth is a flower of which love is the fruit … Happy the vintager who picks it after watching it slowly mature.’
‘What is life except a pause in the antechamber of death?’
Moral wounds have the peculiarity that they are invisible, but do not close: always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain tender and open in the heart.
Truly generous men are always ready to feel compassion when their enemy’s misfortune exceeds the bounds of their hatred.
What I have loved most after you, Mercédès, is myself, that is to say my dignity, that is to say the strength that made me superior to other men. That strength was my life. You have shattered it with a word. I die.’
I know that the world is a drawing-room from which one must retire politely and honourably, that is to say, with a bow, after paying one’s gaming debts.’
For hearts which have long suffered, happiness is like dew on soil parched by the sun: both heart and earth absorb this beneficial rain as it falls on them, and nothing appears on the surface.
What is happening to me is what happens to people who are wounded in a dream: they look at their wound and they feel it but cannot remember how it was caused.
‘Death has its secrets of pain and pleasure, like life; it is just a question of knowing what they are.’
there is neither happiness nor misfortune in this world, there is merely the comparison between one state and another, nothing more. Only someone who has suffered the deepest misfortune is capable of experiencing the heights of felicity. Maximilien, you must needs have wished to die, to know how good it is to live.
‘My dearest,’ said Valentine, ‘has the count not just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words – “wait” and “hope”?’
