Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred de Vigny

Vigny is trying to make “vague and cloudy” sound like a feature, not a failure. The sentence opens with a sly concession to moral life: we routinely “descend into our consciences” to judge actions our rational minds “can not weigh.” That verb, descend, matters. Conscience isn’t an airy ideal; it’s a plunge into a dim interior where the usual instruments of measurement don’t work. Then he pivots: if we accept that inner darkness as valid for ethics, why not grant the same legitimacy to the murkier origins of thought itself?

The intent is Romantic but disciplined: to argue that the deepest truths arrive before they’re fully legible. Vigny isn’t anti-reason so much as anti-accounting. He’s suspicious of the Enlightenment fantasy that every human judgment can be balanced like a ledger. The subtext is a defense of the poet’s method: forms of thought are “born” from feeling, not assembled from proofs, and what looks like fog is the necessary atmosphere of creation. He frames it as a question to disarm the skeptic; you’re invited to answer yes, because you already do this with conscience.

Contextually, this lands in early-to-mid 19th-century France, when Romantic writers were elevating interiority against the era’s growing confidence in science, systems, and public certainty. Vigny’s cloudy feeling isn’t just personal mood; it’s an argument for respecting the pre-verbal, half-formed stirrings that precede ideology, art, and even moral clarity. The provocation is that the mind’s most consequential work happens before it can explain itself.