To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

Toleration is the best religion.

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.

When liberty returns, I will return.

Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

No one can keep a secret better than a child.

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

The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.

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!

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.

Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.

One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

Pain is as diverse as man. One suffers as one can.

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.

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.

The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.

Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

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

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

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

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

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

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

Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

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.

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

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.