If God had intended that man should go backward, he would have given him eyes in the back of his head.
As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.
Gutenberg’s invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution.
I think I missed my calling. I should have been an interior decorator.
The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.
Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.
At a certain depth of distress, the poor, in their stupor, groan no longer over evil, and are no longer thankful for good.
Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.
God is behind everything, but everything hides God.
Everything speaks: the flowing airstream and the sailing halycon, the blade of grass, the flower, the bud, the element; did you imagine the universe to be otherwise?
Dreaming is happiness. Waiting is life.
Art moves. Hence its civilizing power.
Algebra applies to the clouds.
Symmetry is tedious, and tedium is the very basis of mourning. Despair yawns.
God blesses man, not for having found but for having sought.
Progress is not accomplished in one stage.
The tomb is not a blind alley: it is a thoroughfare. It closes on the twilight. It opens on the dawn.
She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.
There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius.
Men are still men. The despot’s wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power’s excess, – Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.