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