Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it – there is a certain shameful solidarity.
Every step which the intelligence of Europe has taken has been in spite of the clerical party.
To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one’s piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.
In the domain of art there is no light without heat.
All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.
Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.
When two souls have finally found each other, there is established between them a union which begins on earth and continues forever in heaven.
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.