All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts, education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth; and.
Let that vile sand which you trample under foot be cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe there, it will become a splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will discover stars.
The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map.
She took recourse to the expedient of constantly terrified children. She lied.
As long as ignorance and misery exist in the world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless.
A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces, to some extent, the particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell.
Esiste un modo di evitare che somiglia al cercare.
In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live; to-day, in order to live, I will not steal a name.
To love someone is to make them transparent.
Old men need affection as they need the sun.
Nothing chills the heart like symmetry, for symmetry is ennui and ennui is at the heart of grief.
A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there, binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas. But.
Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that a wedding was a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet does not spoil a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even in excess, provided it be honest, and decent, does happiness no harm, and that, in short, it is a good and a venerable thing that the fusion of these two destinies whence a family is destined to spring, should begin at home, and that the household should thenceforth have its nuptial chamber as its witness. And.
How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand?
Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age, which released them from the necessity of understanding it.
What matters it if the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences of the sky.
This blind-man’s-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour and killed several panes of glass.
To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there.
O Josephine, face more than irregular, you would be charming were you not all askew. You have the air of a pretty face upon which some one has sat down by mistake.
CHAPTER I – M. MYRIEL.