A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

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

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

To love beauty is to see light.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.

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

Liberation is not deliverance.

Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

Toleration is the best religion.

I'm religiously opposed to religion.

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

To love another person is to see the face of God.

To love is to act.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.

Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

There is nothing like a dream to create the future.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

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

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.

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

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

Habit is the nursery of errors.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

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

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.