Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
To think of shadows is a serious thing.
Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.
Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
A library implies an act of faith.
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
Stupidity talks, vanity acts.
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
No one can keep a secret better than a child.
Wisdom is a sacred communion.
Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
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