There is a secret drawer in every woman’s heart.
I am for religion, against religions.
Every man is a book in which God himself writes.
The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young.
Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.
Right is right only when entire.
Too much improvisation leaves the mind stupidly void.
A sewer is a cynic. It tells All.
Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.
Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brilliancy of its own.
Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.
To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time, especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.
For sight is woman-like and shuns the old.
Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.
The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.
The malicious have a dark happiness.
I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality. -Claude Frollo.
These are true felicities. No joy beyond these joys. Love is the only ecstasy, everything else weeps.
What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.
Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.