“Forty is the old age of youth fifty the youth of old age.”
“When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”
“Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.”
“Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble in a statue the marble must be like flesh.”
“I am a soul. I know well that what I shall render up to the grave is not myself. That which is myself will go elsewhere. Earth, thou art not my abyss!”
“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.”
“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
“To love beauty is to see light.”
“What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.”
“Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.”
“The ideal and the beautiful are identical the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form hence idea and substance are cognate.”
“Toleration is the best religion.”
“Change your opinions, keep to your principles change your leaves, keep intact your roots.”
“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.”
“Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.”
“Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.”
“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
“Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.”
“A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.”
“A library implies an act of faith.”
“Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.”
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
“What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.”
“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
“Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.”
“Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.”
“Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.”
“When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.”
“Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.”
“Conscience is God present in man.”
“Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.”
“The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.”
“To think is of itself to be useful it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.”
“Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.”
“Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.”
“A great artist is a great man in a great child.”
“Many great actions are committed in small struggles.”
“Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.”
“There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.”
“The three great problems of this century the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.”
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.”
“Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.”
“Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.”
“To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.”
“Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.”
“A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”
“Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.”
“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”
“I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.”
“There are fathers who do not love their children there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.”
“The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity in a girl boldness.”
“Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.”
“Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.”
“I love all men who think, even those who think otherwise than myself.”
“The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.”
“Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?”
“Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.”
“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.”
“He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.”
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
“Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.”
“As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.”
“Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”
“The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.”
“Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.”
“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
“I'm religiously opposed to religion.”
“Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.”
“Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.”
“Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.”
“People do not lack strength they lack will.”
“Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.”
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”
“Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.”
“Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”
“We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.”
“To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.”
“A war between Europeans is a civil war.”
“Wisdom is a sacred communion.”
“We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.”
“One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.”
“A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.”
“To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.”