It is man’s consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.
There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.
The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it constantly blaze with noble lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history and form one of man’s guiding lights.
Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.
God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger.
A republic may be called the climate of civilization.
Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.
Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?
Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?
Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.
To know, to think, to dream. That is everything.
Civilization survives on the constant discovery of amity and an equal supply of damnation.
I dislike wealth and prosperity, especially that of other men.
Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.
We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.
Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.
There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation.
Everything bows to success, even grammar.
The clouds, – the only birds that never sleep.
God was bored by him.