What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.
Forty is the old age of youth fifty the youth of old age.
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble in a statue the marble must be like flesh.
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity in a girl boldness.
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Wisdom is a sacred communion.
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.
To think is of itself to be useful it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
I'm religiously opposed to religion.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
The ideal and the beautiful are identical the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form hence idea and substance are cognate.
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
People do not lack strength they lack will.
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
A library implies an act of faith.
Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.
Conscience is God present in man.
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.