Each of our passions, even love, has a stomach that must not be overloaded. We must in everything write the word 'finis' in time; we must restrain ourselves, when it becomes urgent; we must draw the b...
Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can the man created good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul be completely made over by fate, and become evil, fate being evil?...
Do we ever realize our fondest dreams?
Djali trotted along behind them, so overjoyed at seeing Gringoire again that she constantly made him stumble by affectionately putting her horns between his legs. 'That's life,' said the philosopher,...
Demain, dès l'aube, à l'heure où blanchit la campagne,Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends.J'irai par la forêt, j'irai par la montagne.Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.Je march...
Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step insi...
Death does not concern me. He who takes his first step uses perhaps his last shoes. (Halmalo)
Clearly, he had his own strange way of judging things. I suspect he acquired it from the Gospels.
Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections, by all this, had flung himself eagerly into the arms of learning, that sister which, at least does not laugh in your face, and which always pa...
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any war that is not fought between men, between brothers?
Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the word is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from h...
Certain forms are torn down, and it is well that they should be, but on condition that they are followed by reconstruction.
Ce sont les quatre avant-gardes du genre humain allant aux quatre points cardinaux du progrès, Diderot vers le beau, Turgot vers l'utile, Voltaire vers le vrai, Rousseau vers le juste.
Aucun penseur n'oserait dire que le parfum de l'aubépine est inutile aux constellations.
As we have just observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness.
As time rolls on, however, we discover that duty is a series of compromises; we contemplate life, regard its end, and submit; but it is a submission which makes the heart bleed.
As long as social damnation exists, through law and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilization and muddying the a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as these thr...
Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.
Am I not as much a doctor as they? I too have my patients; in the first place, theirs, whom they call sick; and then my own, whom I call unfortunate.
All is not at an end on earth since we can still talk nonsense.