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