But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France - that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?

France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.

We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?

No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.

Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy?

Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.

From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own.

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete.

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.

The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.

An army is a nation within a nation, it is one of the vices of courage.

We live in an age of universal investigation and of exploration of the sources of all movements.

History is a novel for which the people is the author.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

We don't have an eternity to realize our dreams, only the time we are here.

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

I was born in 1961. Now I think the 16 years that elapsed between 1961 and the end of the wars is nothing. To a child growing up it felt like an eternity, an entirely different world.

War is eternity jammed into frantic minutes that will fill a lifetime with dreams and nightmares.

Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity.

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

The realm of immediate or personal knowledge is a narrow circle in which these bodies move; the realm of knowledge derived through faith is as wide as the universe, and old as eternity.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

God exists in eternity. The only point where eternity meets time is in the present. The present is the only time there is.

Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.

Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

There are tons of people I'd like to freeze for all of eternity, but we won't go into that!

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Rest, rest, shall I have not all eternity to rest.