To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.

Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women's clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.

Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.

Suffering! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.

Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.

Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.

An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.