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Love & Passion Quote by Alfred de Musset

"With a kiss let us set out for an unknown world"

About this Quote

Romanticism loved a cliff edge, and Musset gives you one in a single breath: affection as ignition, uncertainty as destination. “With a kiss” isn’t decorative foreplay; it’s a deliberately small, bodily act that pretends to be modest even as it authorizes something enormous. The line works because it treats intimacy like a visa stamp. No speeches, no vows, no moral accounting - just contact, then motion.

“Let us set out” is the quiet power move. Musset frames desire as a joint decision, not a conquest. The plural pronoun turns what could be reckless into a kind of pact: we are complicit, we are leaving together. That matters in the Musset universe, where love is often a blend of tenderness and self-sabotage, sincerity and performance. The kiss is both promise and disguise: it can mean devotion, or it can be the last elegant gesture before chaos.

“An unknown world” lands with strategic vagueness. It can be adultery, art, exile, adulthood, a new city, a new moral code - the point is that the future stays unnamed, which makes it easier to choose. In the 1830s French Romantic climate Musset inhabited, the “unknown” was a posture against bourgeois predictability: feeling over planning, experience over prudence. The line flatters the reader’s appetite for risk while keeping the cost offstage. It’s seduction dressed as adventure, and it remains modern because it understands how people leap: not by knowing, but by touching.

Quote Details

TopicRomantic
More Quotes by Alfred Add to List
Musset: A Kiss as the Beginning of a Shared Journey
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About the Author

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Alfred de Musset (December 11, 1810 - May 2, 1857) was a Writer from France.

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