There are young men of whom it can be said that their countenances chatter. One looks at them and one knows them.
All war is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it.
There has come into fashion a strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassing facts and all gloomy questions.
It appears that Satan had taken a fancy to the Catholics; and sought their company a good deal; a circumstance which has given rise to the belief that the devil is more Catholic than Protestant.
All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age, which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness.
A moment later he was in his garden, walking, meditating, contemplating, his heart and soul wholly absorbed in those grand and mysterious things which God shows at night to the eyes which remain open.
Hope in a child who has never known anything but despair is a sweet and touching thing.
Let us live, by all means. But let us try to ensure that death is a progress. Let us aspire to worlds that are less dark. Let us follow the conscience that leads us there.
No tratar con la gente permite atribuirle todas las perfecciones.
A creature so beautiful that God would have preferred her to the Virgin and have chosen her for his mother and have wished to be born of her if she had been in existence when he was made man!
At that time, for the thought written in stone, there existed a privilege perfectly comparable to our present liberty of the press. It was the liberty of architecture.
The slashers have finished; it was the turn of the thinkers. The century that Waterloo was intended to arrest has pursued its march. That sinister victory was vanquished by liberty.
What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being!
Success; that is the lesson which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption. Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.
If we ever feel the need to follow something, let it be our own Divine intuition.
At length he told himself that it must be so, that his destiny was thus allotted, that he had not authority to alter the arrangements made on high, that, in any case, he must make his choice: virtue without and abomination within, or holiness within and infamy without.
To be nothing where he had been everything was an unendurable decline.
A man’s eye reveals his quality. It shows how much of a man there is within us. We declare ourselves by the light that gleams under our eyebrows. Petty spirits merely wink; great spirits emit a flash of lightning.
Sublime characters are stubborn.
The galleys make the convict what he is; reflect upon that, if you please. Before going to the galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me. I was stupid; I became vicious: I was a block of wood; I became a firebrand. Later on, indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me.