"Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!"
"There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson"
"The wise man does not grow old, but ripens"
"The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring"
"The learned man knows that he is ignorant"
"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone"
"The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate"
"The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live"
"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves"
"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"
"The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced"
"The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand"
"Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest"
"Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time"
"Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence"
"Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter"
"Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God"
"Reaction - a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on"
"Puns are the droppings of soaring wits"
"What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!"
"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great"
"We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present"
"We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution"
"There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling"
"He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free"
"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"
"Toleration is the best religion"
"To think of shadows is a serious thing"
"To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God"
"To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful"
"There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul"
"There is nothing like a dream to create the future"
