To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.
To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
The true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind.
No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.
Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily.
No living creature, not even man, has achieved, in the centre of his sphere, what the bee has achieved in her own: and were some one from another world to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation of the logic of life, we should needs have to offer the humble comb of honey.
Men’s weaknesses are often necessary to the purposes of life.
An obstacle is not a discouragement. It may become one, but only with our own consent. So long as we refuse to be discouraged, we cannot be discouraged.
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most.
Once at a potent leader’s voice I stayed; Once I went back when a good monarch prayed; Mortals, howe’er we grieve, howe’er deplore, The flying shadow will return no more.
And on this earth of ours there are but few souls that can withstand the dominion of the soul that has suffered itself to become beautiful.
A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.
Sacrifice may be a flower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this flower that virtue set forth on its travels.
Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.
It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord.
Wisdom requires no form; her beauty must vary, as varies the beauty of flame. She is no motionless goddess, for ever couched on her throne.
What man is there that does not laboriously, though all unconsciously, himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life.
The hour of justice does not strike On the dials of this world.
I am moved by the light.