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