Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.
We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.
Sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy.
There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling, except in the infinite; for the soul, except in the divine.
What we call little things are merely the causes of great things.
When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in balance with the whole work of God.
Time wasted is a theft from God.
Life is but a daily oscillation between revolt and submission.
Knowledge, love, power-there is the complete life.
Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.
If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
Great men are the real men, in them nature has succeeded.
Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement.
What governs men is the fear of truth.
Life alone can rekindle life.
How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified.
A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety nine retreat; That is progress.
What we call little things are merely the causes of great things; they are the beginning, the embryo, and it is the point of departure which, generally speaking, decides the whole future of an existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of gangrene, of a storm, of a revolution.
I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness?
It is dangerous to abandon one’s self to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.
Habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one’s maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book.