Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

Let us fear the worst, but work with faith; the best will always take care of itself.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Does not beauty confer a benefit upon us, even by the simple fact of being beautiful?

Oh Lord! Open the doors of night for me So that I may leave this place and disappear.

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

During a wise man's whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege.

For dogs we kings should have lions, and for cats, tigers. The great benefits a crown.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.

If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.

Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.

Man does not understand nor accept immortality except on condition of self-remembrance.

The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.

Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.

Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.

Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.

Mothers arms are made of tenderness, And sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

I only take a half share in the civil war; I am willing to die, I am not willing to kill.

The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.

I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

What is called honors and dignities, and even honor and dignity, is generally fool's gold.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer.

God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.

Yes, instruction! Light! Light! Everything comes from light, and to everything it returns.

Civilization survives on the constant discovery of amity and an equal supply of damnation.

The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.

For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind.

We would be ashamed of our best behavior if the people knew the motives of our behaving so.

That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

A joyous little creature, so beautiful, It was as if a gate of Heaven opened as she came in.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

One only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.

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