Quote collection
176 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"God abandons only those who abandon themselves, and whoever has the courage to shut up his sorrow within his own heart is stronger to fight against it than he who complains."
"Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith."
"To eat together is one of the greatest promoters of intimacy. It is the satisfaction in common of a material necessity of existence, and if you seek a loftier meaning in it, it is a communion."
"No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand."
"Weakness is oftentimes so palpable as to be equivalent to wickedness."
"Fame and admiration weigh not a feather in the scale against friendship and love, for the heart languishes all the same."
"The smoke of glory is not worth the smoke of a pipe."
"One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe."
"No one makes a revolution by himself."
"If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity."
"The lessons of experience are always learned too late."
"It is always the best friends who are neglected and ignored."
"No human creature can give orders to love."
"The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society."
"Age continually alters the faces of those who think or study, and so their portraits differ from one another and don't even resemble them for very long. I dream so much and live so little that I'm sometimes only three years old. But the next day I'm three hundred, if the dream has been sombre."
"we do not die of anguish, we live on. We continue to suffer. We drink the cup drop by drop."
"Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves."
"Unrequited love is as different from the mutual love as the error from the truth."
"Humanity is outraged in me and with me."
"It seems to me that the earth belongs to God who made it and entrusted it to men as a perpetual home. But it cannot have been part of His plan that some men should be ill with overfeeding and that others should die of starvation. No matter what anyone can say they cannot prevent me from feeling sad and angry when I see a beggar crying at a rich man's door."