Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.
Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.
Those who live are those who fight.
Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.
Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
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.
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
The word is the Verb, and the Verb is God.
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.
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.
Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.
What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!
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.
The ox suffers, the cart complains.
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.
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Stupidity talks, vanity acts.
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.