The peculiarity of prudery is to multiply sentinels, in proportion as the fortress is less threatened |
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories that it has come to be disbelieved. Few people daresay nowadays that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at eachother. Yet that is the way love begins, and only that way. |
The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love. |
The sublimest song to be heard on earth is the lisping of the human soul on the lips of children |
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved |
The voices of those children, that is the voice of the immense future. |
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson |
There are obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude. There are noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees. No renown rewards, and no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, and poverty and battlefields which have their heroes. |
There are people who observe the rules of honor as we observe the stars: from a distance |
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees. |
There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime. |
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. |
There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher- the clergyman |
There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation. |
There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height |