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