Named source · 1850

The Black Tulip Quotes by Alexandre Dumas: Context & Meanings

1 quotation linked to The Black Tulip by or associated with Alexandre Dumas, with source notes, explanations and related topics.

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About this source

Alexandre Dumas’s 1850 historical novel, represented in English translation and with Project Gutenberg crediting Auguste Maquet alongside Dumas

Topics and ideas

Envy, ambition, flowers, love, imprisonment, political violence, patience and the moral consequences of rationalized wrongdoing.

English wording

Translation

Uncredited translator in the represented Routledge / Project Gutenberg edition · French → English

The wording shown here follows the represented English edition or translation.

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Represented passages

1 quotations with source context and meaning

Source identified1

But there is this terrible thing in evil thoughts, that evil minds soon grow familiar with them.

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Read & copy

“But there is this terrible thing in evil thoughts, that evil minds soon grow familiar with them.”

Alexandre Dumas

Voice: Fictional narrator · Narrator

Meaning & context

The narrator warns that repeatedly entertaining a harmful idea can reduce the resistance a person initially feels toward acting on it.

Source details

The Black Tulip, Chapter VIII, “An Invasion,” Project Gutenberg #965. Exact-witness review corrects the inherited Chapter VI locator: the narrator says that evil minds soon grow familiar with evil thoughts immediately after Boxtel first shrinks from informing against Van Baerle and before he rationalizes the act.