To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life.
Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God.
While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.
Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.
Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.
I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore the ordinary rules of common-sense.
Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?
We flew back home like swallows. ‘Is it happiness that makes us so light?’ Agathe asked.
Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.