A war between Europeans is a civil war.
— Victor Hugo
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
Those who live are those who fight.
People do not lack strength; they lack will.
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
A library implies an act of faith.
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
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.
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.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
I'm religiously opposed to religion.
It is by suffering that human beings become angels.
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.
There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
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.
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!
Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
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.
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
To love another person is to see the face of God.
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
