All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.
We have drugs to make women speak, but none to keep them silent.
Nothing spoils a confession like repentance.
America, where thanks to Congress, there are forty million laws to enforce the Ten Commandments.
For every monarchy overthrown the sky becomes less brilliant, because it loses a star. A republic is ugliness set free.
God forbids suicide, and is unwilling that his creatures should destroy themselves.
War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.
A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.
As to the kind of truth one finds in books, it is a truth that enables us sometimes to discern what things are not, without ever enabling us to discover what they are.
It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.
I am but a miserable sinner, but I have found, in my long life, that the cenobite has no foe worse than sadness”.
I must beg very serious persons not to read this. It is not written for them. It is not written for grave people who despise trifles and who always require to be instructed. I only venture to offer this to those who like to be entertained, and whose minds are both young and gay. Only those who are amused by innocent pleasures will read this to the end.
We love truly only those we love even in their weakness and their poverty. To forbear, to forgive, to console, that alone is the science of love.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Have we not seen many times indeed human beings who, poor and naked, prostrate themselves before all the phantoms of fear, and rather than follow the teaching of well-disposed demons, obey the commandments of cruel demiurges?
Insane Europeans who plot to cut each others’ throats, now that one and the same civilisation enfolds and unites them all!
I love reason, but my love does not make me a fanatic,′ Brotteaux answered. ‘Reason is our guide, a light to show us our way; but if you make a divinity of it, it will blind you and lead you into crime.
But canst thou only die, withered embryo, foetus steeped in gall and scalding tears? Miserable abortion, dost thou think thou canst taste death, thou who hast never known life? If only God exists, that he may damn me. I hope for it. I wish it. God, I hate Thee! dost Thou hear? Overwhelm me with Thy damnation. To compel Thee to, I spit in Thy face. I must find an eternal hell, to exhaust the eternity of rage which consumes me.
The sadness of churches at night moves me; I feel in them the grandeur of nothingness.