Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles-is this not to master the future?
If you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly, even so shall you love your neighbor.
All mothers are rich when they love their children. There are no poor mothers, no ugly ones, no old ones. Their love is always the most beautiful of joys.
We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.
Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.
It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.
The living are just the dead on holiday.
We possess only the happiness we able to understand.
I knew that if I was captured by the Germans I would be shot at once, since I have always been counted as an enemy of Germany because of my play, Le Bourgmestre de Stillemonde, which dealt with the conditions in Belgium during the German Occupation of 1918.
I count only the hours that are serene.
It is death that is the guide of our life, and our life has no goal but death.
I have done what I could do in life, and if I could not do better, I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?
It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.
In the world which we know, among the different and primitive geniuses that preside over the evolution of the several species, there exists not one, excepting that of the dog, that ever gave a thought to the presence of man.
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors.
Above all, let us never forget that an act of goodness is in itself an act of happiness. It is the flower of a long inner life of joy and contentment; it tells of peaceful hours and days on the sunniest heights of our soul.