There are souls which, crab-like, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it, using what experience they have to increase their deformity, growing worse without...
There are for each of us several parallelisms between our intelligence, our habits, and our character, which develop without a break, and break only in the great disturbances of life.
Then overwhelmed by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night, in the presence of that impenetrable darkness, in the midst of t...
Their own destiny is a far-off thing to them ... One declines, descends, trickles away, even crumbles away, and yet is hardly conscious of it one's self. It always ends, it is true, in an awakening, b...
The world is like Olympus - even a thief is accepted in it if he is also a god.
The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. Above all things, do not degenerate into a man, his friend would say to him...
The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against pestilence and suffocation.
The victory of humanity over man.Humanity had conquered the inhuman.And by what means? In what way? How had it overcome the giant of anger and hatred? What arms had it used? What engine of war? The cr...
The true division of humanity is this: the luminous and the dark.To diminish the number of the dark, to increase the number of the luminous, there is the aim.That is why we cry: education, knowledge!...
The soul falls into contemplation before this sanctuary, where the celebration of love is held.
The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus set the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment fr...
The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion under the Caesars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the sacred shad...
The senator...was a smart man who had made his way in life with a single-mindedness oblivious to any of those stumbling blocks known as conscience, sworn oaths, justice, duty...
The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists; b...
The real threat to society is darkness. Humanity is our common lot. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, at least here on earth, in the fate assigned to us. We come of the same v...
The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,—that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To...
The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.
The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it should be ablaze with noble and enduring lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history, and form one of the guiding lights o...
The most beautiful of altars, he said, is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thanking God.
The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world d...