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.
Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.
A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?
True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.
He who is not master of his own thoughts is not accountable for his own deeds.
The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.
Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.
When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.