The Count of Monte Cristo Quotes

“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.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Nasıl her meyvenin bir kurdu varsa, her insanın da yüreğini kemiren bir tutkusu vardır.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“as you see, i am absolutely pitiless in my pursuit of you. you thought you could escape my lavish generosity, but you will not. so listen”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“i may be eccentric, it's true, but my eccentricity does not extent to breaking my word once i have given it”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Non vi è né felicità né infelicità in questo mondo, ma soltanto il paragone di una condizione con un'altra, ecco tutto. Soltanto chi ha provato l'estremo dolore può gustare la suprema felicità. Bisogna aver desiderato la morte, Maximilien, per sapere quale bene è la vita.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Moral wounds have this peculiarity, - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“I swear, you are frightening me!’ said Dantès. ‘Is the world full of tigers and crocodiles then?’
‘Yes, except that the tigers and crocodiles with two legs are more dangerous than the rest.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Listen,” said the count, and deep hatred mounted to his face, as the blood would to the face of any other. “If a man had by unheard-of and excruciating tortures destroyed your father, your mother, your betrothed—a being who, when torn from you, left a desolation, a wound that never closes, in your breast—do you think the reparation that society gives you is sufficient when it interposes the knife of the guillotine between the base of the occiput and the trapezal muscles of the murderer, and allows him who has caused us years of moral sufferings to escape with a few moments of physical pain?”

“Yes, I know,” said Franz, “that human justice is insufficient to console us; she can give blood in return for blood, that is all; but you must demand from her only what it is in her power to grant.”

“I will put another case to you,” continued the count; “that where society, attacked by the death of a person, avenges death by death. But are there not a thousand tortures by which a man may be made to suffer without society taking the least cognizance of them, or offering him even the insufficient means of vengeance, of which we have just spoken? Are there not crimes for which the impalement of the Turks, the augers of the Persians, the stake and the brand of the Iroquois Indians, are inadequate tortures, and which are unpunished by society? Answer me, do not these crimes exist?”

“Yes,” answered Franz; “and it is to punish them that duelling is tolerated.”

“Ah, duelling,” cried the count; “a pleasant manner, upon my soul, of arriving at your end when that end is vengeance! A man has carried off your mistress, a man has seduced your wife, a man has dishonored your daughter; he has rendered the whole life of one who had the right to expect from Heaven that portion of happiness God has promised to every one of his creatures, an existence of misery and infamy; and you think you are avenged because you send a ball through the head, or pass a sword through the breast, of that man who has planted madness in your brain, and despair in your heart. And remember, moreover, that it is often he who comes off victorious from the strife, absolved of all crime in the eyes of the world. No, no,” continued the count, “had I to avenge myself, it is not thus I would take revenge.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“But madame, does mankind ever lose anything?
The arts change about and make a tour of the world; things take a different name, and the vulgar do not follow them- that is all; but there is always the same result.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Wait and hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“(...) until the day when God deigns to unveil the future to mankind, all human wisdom is contained in these two words: ‘wait’ and ‘hope’!”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Maximiliano se apoyaba en uno de estos árboles, y tenía clavados sus ojos inciertos sobre las dos tumbas. Su dolor era profundo, casi le trastornaba. -Maximiliano -le dijo el conde-, no es ahí donde se debe mirar, sino allí. Y le señaló el cielo.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Mirad cómo la naturaleza sabe calmar los más agudos dolores.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“El edificio que la desgracia destruye, la Providencia puede reedificarlo.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“La voluntad de Dios es que el hombre que ha creado y en cuyo corazón ha puesto con tantas raíces el amor a la vida, haga cuanto pueda por conservar esta vida, tan trabajosa algunas veces y siempre tan
amada.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“La incertidumbre es el peor de todos los suplicios.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Sólo el que ha experimentado el colmo del infortunio puede sentir la felicidad suprema. Es preciso haber querido morir, amigo mío, para saber cuán buena y hermosa es la vida.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“La ausencia separa a las personas casi mejor que la muerte.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“We are used to adversity; let’s not be crushed by a mere disappointment, or else I shall have suffered for nothing. The heart breaks when it has swelled too much in the warm breath of hope, then finds itself enclosed in cold reality.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“All human wisdom is summed up in these two words - 'Wait and hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Don't you want to say goodbye to me?' he asked, holding out his hand.
'Yes, indeed,' Mercedès said, solemnly pointing to heaven. 'I will say au revoir, to prove to you that I still hope.'
She touched the count's hand with her own, trembling, then ran up the stairs and vanished from his sight.
Monte Cristo slowly left the house and turned back towards the port. Mercedès did not see him leave, even though she was at the window of the little room that had been his father's. Her eyes were searching the distant horizon for the ship taking her son across the open sea. But her voice, almost involuntarily, muttered softly: 'Edmond, Edmond, Edmond!”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Death, according to the care we take to be on good or bad terms with it, is either a friend which will rock us as gently as a nursing mother or an enemy which will savagely tear apart body and soul. One day, when our world has lived another thousand years, when people have mastered all the destructive forces of nature and harnessed them to the general good of mankind, and when, as you just said, men have learnt the secrets of death, then death will be as sweet and voluptuous as sleep in a lover’s arms.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“There is no one in the world your equal: there is nothing that resembles you. Now, say farewell to me, Edmond, and let us be parted.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“There was a long silence. The peach, like the bunch of grapes, had fallen on the sand.
'Monsieur le Comte,' Mercédès said finally, looking imploringly at Monte Cristo, 'there is a touching Arab custom that promises eternal friendship between those who have shared bread and salt under the same roof.
'I know it, Madame,' the count replied. But we are in France and not in Arabia; and in France there is no more eternal friendship than there is sharing of bread and salt."
'But we are friends, are we not?' she said, breathing rapidly and looking directly into Monte Cristo's eyes, while clasping his arm with both hands.
The blood rushed to the count's heart and he became as white as death; then it rose from his heart to his throat and spread across his cheeks. For a few moments his eyes would not focus, like those of a man dazzled by a bright light. 'Of course we are friends, Madame,' he replied. 'Why should we not be?”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“All those around me are free to leave, and will have no further need of me or of anyone else. Perhaps that is why they do not leave me.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Perhaps nothing: the overflowing of my brain might have evaporated in mere futilities. 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.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“let me be told what crime I have committed and what sentence I have been given; because, you understand, uncertainty is the worst of torments”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“forgotten, if not by men, at least by God”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“a man of superior intelligence who, though he had little experience of the world, had an instinct for it”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“prey to all the agonized feelings that enter a man’s heart when he has ambition and has been honored for the first time”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo