Time follows its course carrying events with it; what is obscure one evening, is often revealed the next.
How closely he looks at you.
However much a man is inured to taking risks, however well prepared he is for danger, the fluttering of his heart and the pricking of his skin will always let him know the vast difference that lies between dream and reality, planning and execution.
I felt ashamed at letting a talent like mine go to waste, and, as I had been given some new pistols, I thought I’d try them out on the Arabs.
And follow me wherever I go?’ – ‘To the world’s end.
In every country where independence takes the place of liberty, the first need felt by any strong mind and powerful constitution is to possess a weapon which can serve both for attack and defence; and which, by making its bearer formidable, will mean that he often inspires dread.
There are people who laugh at the horse who would not dare to laugh at the master.
Come, come. Enough of poison. Now that my heart is full of it, let us go and find the antidote.
No halfway emotions can exist in a heart swollen with utmost despair.
Some virtues, when taken to the extreme, become crimes.
My friend,’ said Maximilien, ‘the voice of my heart is sad indeed and promises only misfortune.’ ‘Only a weak spirit sees everything from behind a dark veil. The soul makes its own horizons; your soul is overcast, and that is why the sky seems stormy to you.
Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced – from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination.
The sentiment of flattery is instinctive with people of abject condition; they have the sense of it, as the wild animal has that of hearing and smell.
Ah! It is precisely in this that we reveal our base material origins. Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or, even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it.
She did this in order to distract her mind, that she might forget; and she only filled her head thus in order to alleviate the weight on her heart.
All earthly ills yield to two all-potent remedies, time and silence.
Do you know what you have done, wise as you are? I have waited a month, which means I have suffered a month. I hoped-man is such a poor and miserable creature-I hoped, for what? I don’t know: something unimaginable, absurd, senseless, a miracle... but what? God alone knows, for it was He who diluted our reason with that madness called hope.
Eh! sire, that is the fate of truth; she is a stern companion; she bristles all over with steel; she wounds those whom she attacks, and sometimes him who speaks her.
Now, I entertain a ridiculous partiality for my head, it seems to suit my shoulders so correctly.
How odd and inexplicable are the paths of destiny. What intention did Providence have by ruining the one who it has raised up, and raising up the one who it has ruined?