How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

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.

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

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.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

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.

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

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.

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.

Habit is the nursery of errors.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

To love beauty is to see light.

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

To love is to act.

Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

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!

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

A library implies an act of faith.

To love another person is to see the face of God.

When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.

Conscience is God present in man.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

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 mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

Toleration is the best religion.

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.

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

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

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.

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

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.