Beyond his successful writing career, Alexandre Dumas lived a colorful and active life. With this wealth of experience and his excellent wit, Dumas expressed, directly and through the characters of his works, profound quotes from which one can learn much about life.
Wisdom
In a nutshell, wisdom is insight from distilling the noise in ordinary and everyday events and occurrences into a valuable and condensed idea that can guide and direct one to live or appreciate life better.
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.
The above makes a partly humorous remark about people’s relationship with advice. Often, when a person asks for advice, they have already decided on what to do, and if advised against it, they may find it hard to review their actions accordingly. However, if they are supported or follow the counselor’s advice and it fails, they reserve some or all the blame for their actions on the one who gave advice.
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
Dumas here distinguishes between mere acquisition of knowledge and genuinely becoming wise. One merely gathers facts, figures, and other information, while the other requires digesting and assimilating these data. Then, he processes them into ideas capable of informing one of the best ways to live.
Life
Alexandre Dumas participated in revolutions in his native France and Italy. He had liaisons with more than a few women. Also, he lived so lavishly that he was always on the brink of bankruptcy. There is something to be said for the idea that Dumas lived fully and had a thing or two worth saying about life.
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.
In this quote, Dumas highlights the unpredictability of life conditions and one’s fortunes. He offers that expecting this and acting despite the storms, rather than succumbing to it, makes a person.
It’s necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.
This grim quote expresses the idea that one appreciates how good life is when they have been pushed to the extreme and witnessed how bad life can get.
Happiness
To Alexandre Dumas, happiness is not an absolute desirable end, and he has reservations about it. The reader gets a better perspective on this elusive emotion in his much-nuanced ideas about happiness.
When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.
One glimpses a slight rebuke against escapism in this statement. A make-believe life is ultimately more pleasing and delightful than the real one, with its many inconveniences. But, warned Dumas, gravitating to the imaginary life is not living, only losing oneself in a dream.
Happiness is like those palaces in fairytales whose gates are guarded by dragons: We must fight in order to conquer it.
Simply put, this Dumas quote states that strife and conflict are necessary for genuine happiness. One must defeat something to be happy.
I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride
Again, Dumas shows that he has reason to be wary of happiness. We all know that pride blinds one to obstacles, as the saying, ‘Pride goes before a fall’ asserts. Dumas boldly claims that happiness gives one an even more substantial handicap. The happier one is, generally, the less vigilant, cautious, or reserved one becomes.
For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.
Prayer becomes rote and habitual until a person sorely needs God’s help. Then, he imbues his prayers with meaning, passion, and attention, careful to speak to his needs to God.
Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it.
From his other statements about happiness, one can deduce that if we hardly know true happiness because we avoid the challenges necessary to acquire it, it is possible that we also do not recognize the opportunity for true happiness because it does not look like happiness at all.
Those born to wealth, and who have the means of gratifying every wish, know not what is the real happiness of life, just as those who have been tossed on the stormy waters of the ocean on a few frail planks can alone realize the blessings of fair weather.
Because those who have plenty never know lack, they have no experience to contrast their abundance and cannot appreciate the difference between both states. Only when they have faced deprivation can people count their blessings.
Realpolitik
Even though he was a romantic writer, Alexandre Dumas showed a firm grasp of the real world and how social and political interactions are practical rather than romantic. His novels owe their perennial appeal to this accurate reporting of human behavior, even in his more fanciful stories.
The king! I thought he was philosopher enough to allow that there was no murder in politics. In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas – no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all.
Political considerations often go beyond dealing with people as people but as impersonal objects to be manipulated at will, and gains and losses tallied without feeling beyond reaching the final objective.
The grand master of the ceremonies then stated that the strangers were of a most villainous appearance, and could not possibly be worse dressed. But the king answered that it was wrong to judge the heart by the countenance, and the gown did not make the parson.
The king in the anecdote suggests that one is wise if one learns to judge not by superficial features but by trying to glimpse something more profound and authentic about a person by closer observation.
