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

At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!

A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the human countenance.

Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.

Inspiration and genius one and the same.

Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and that terrified him -- he who had never in his life known anything but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.

His brain was in one of those states that are both violent and yet frighteningly calm, in which thought runs so deep it blots out reality. You no longer see the objects around you, yet you can see the shapes in your mind as thought they are outside your body.

France is great because she is France.

Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?

All their teeth are yellow. No tooth-brush ever entered that convent. Brushing one's teeth is at the top of a ladder at whose bottom is the loss of one's soul.

A person may not want any more of his cake; but that is no reason for giving it away.

Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.

Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.

In every cradle decked with rosy wreath Lurk germs of death.

She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

Joy is the reflex of terror.

Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.

A bird alone could have extricated himself from that place.

We have here very high towers; a man who should fall from one would be dead before he touched the pavement; when it shall please you to have me to fall, you will not have to even utter a word, a glance will suffice.

The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.