Great Throughts Treasury

"Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end."

"Conscience is doubtless sufficient to conduct the coldest character into the road of virtue; but enthusiasm is to conscience what honor is to duty; there is in us a superfluity of soul, which it is sweet to consecrate to the beautiful when the good has been accomplished."

"Enthusiasm gives life to what is invisible, and interest to what has no immediate action on our comfort in this world. "

"Intellect does not attain its full force unless it attacks power. "

"Divine wisdom, intending to detain us some time on earth, has done well to cover with a veil the prospect of the life to come; for if our sight could clearly distinguish the opposite bank, who would remain on this tempestuous coast of time? "

"Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities. "

"In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable. "

"Kindness and generosity… form the true morality of human actions. "

"One must choose in life between boredom and suffering."

"Men err from selfishness, women because they are weak. "

"Politeness is merely the art of choosing among your thoughts. "

"The greatest happiness is to transform one’s feelings into actions. "

"Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty. "

"The pursuit of politics is religion, morality, and poetry all in one. "

"The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals. "

"The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it: enthusiasm signifies God in us."

"To understand everything makes one very tolerant [indulgent]. "

"The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it. "

"Thought can never be compared with action, but when it awakens in us the image of truth. "

"When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not the decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality."

"We are wrong to fear superiority of mind and soul; this superiority is very moral, for understanding everything makes a person tolerant and the capacity to feel deeply inspires great goodness."

"Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it."

"When we destroy an old prejudice we have need of a new virtue."

"As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely."

"Courage of soul is necessary for the triumphs of genius."

"I learn life from the poets."

"To live beneath sorrow, one must yield to it."

"Truth and, by consequence, liberty, will always be the chief power of honest men."

"The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn towards this Me, the centre and moving power of our sentiments and our ideas."

"Men do not change; they unmask themselves."

"Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man's power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened."

"We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us."

"Architecture is frozen music!"

"The education of life perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous."

"Superstition is related to this life, religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, religion to virtue; it is by the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious; it is. on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these desires that we become religious."

"The only equitable manner in my opinion, of judging the character of a man is to examine if there are personal calculations in his conduct; if there are not, we may blame his manner of judging, but we are not the less bound to esteem him."

"It were no virtue to bear calamities if we do not feel them. "

"The more we know, the better we forgive. Whoever feels deeply, feels for all that live. "

"Life often seems like a long shipwreck of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love. The shores of existence are strewn with them. "

"Love: that self-love a deux. "

"Custom is the tyranny of the lower human faculties over the higher. "

"Fortune does not change men; it unmasks them. "

"A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves. Neither vanity nor conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it."

"Make your best thoughts into action. "

"Order I a house ought to be like the machinery in opera, whose effect produces great pleasure, but whose ends must be hid."

"When death gives us a long lease of life, it takes as hostages all those whom we have loved."

"Love is the only possession which we can carry with us beyond the grave. "

"One can impose silence on sentiment, but one cannot give it limits. "

"A religious life is a struggle, and not a hymn."

"A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it."