Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.
In saying no to progress, it is not the future which they condemn, but themselves. They give themselves a melancholy disease; they inoculate themselves with the past. There is but one way of refusing tomorrow, that is to die.
Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.
We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.
My greatness does not extend to this shelf.
There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth.
To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing, a demi-audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Those who pray always are necessary to those who never pray. In our view, the whole question is in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer.
On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.
To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.
We do not comprehend everything, but we insult nothing.
To be wicked does not insure prosperity – for the inn did not succeed well.
One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to efface.
You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.
Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.
He had slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret of all triumphs.
The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness.
I only take a half share in the civil war; I am willing to die, I am not willing to kill.
A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn.
Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious.