I have heard it said that the dead have never done, in six thousand years, as much evil as the living do in a single day.
Happiness even makes the wicked good.
There is something so awe-inspiring in great afflictions that even in the worst times the first emotion of a crowd has generally been to sympathise with the sufferer in a great catastrophe.
The heart of the best woman is pitiless toward the sorrows of a rival.
But excessive grief is like a storm at sea, where the frail bark is tossed from the depths to the top of the wave.
But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers.
There are men who have suffered and who have not only gone on living, but even built a new fortune on the ruins of their former happiness. From the depths into which their enemies have plunged them, they have risen again with such vigor and glory that they have dominated their former conquerors and cast them down in their turn.
To despise flowers is to offend God.
Armed to the teeth?” “He had not even a knitting-needle.
But the kings of modern times, restrained by the limits of mere probability, have neither courage nor desire. They fear the eat that hears their orders, and the eye that scrutinizes their actions.
The heart breaks when it has swelled too much in the warm breath of hope, then finds itself enclosed in cold reality.
Life is no more than the repeated fulfilling of a permanent desire.
Man does not appear to me to be intended to enjoy felicity so unmixed; happiness is like the enchanted palaces we read of in our childhood, where fierce, fiery dragons defend the entrance and approach; and monsters of all shapes and kinds, requiring to be overcome ere victory is ours.
Never fear quarrels, but seek adventures. I have taught you how to handle a sword; you have thews of iron, a wrist of steel. Fight on all occasions. Fight the more for duels being forbidden, since consequently there is twice as much courage in fighting. I have nothing to give you, my son, but fifteen crowns, my horse, and the counsels you have just heard.
We shine like those fires and those stars; we sigh like those waves; we suffer like those great ships, which are worn out in ploughing the waves, in obeying the wind which urges them towards an end, as the breath of God blows us towards a port. Everything likes to live, Raoul; and everything is beautiful in living things.
Milady felt a consolation in seeing nature partake of the disorder of her heart. The thunder growled in the air like the passion and anger in her thoughts. It appeared to her that the blast as it swept along disheveled her brow, as it bowed the branches of the trees and bore away their leaves. She howled as the hurricane howled; and her voice was lost in the great voice of nature, which also seemed to groan with despair.
When I think of you my heart beats fast, the blood burns in my veins and I can hardly breathe.
He told himself that it was the enmity of man, and not the vengeance of heaven, that had thus plunged him into the deepest misery.
We are all mortal, and the old must make way for the young. If not, why, there would be no promotion.
But these first needs of the heart are so imperious, these outpourings of amorous melancholy in young people are at once so sweet and so bitter, that they have often all the real marks of the passion.