Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
To love beauty is to see light.
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
To love another person is to see the face of God.
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
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.
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
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.
Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
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.
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
To love is to act.
