"We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live."

"Gravity is but the rind of wisdom; but it is a preservative rind."

"Genius begins great works, labor alone finishes them."

"History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable."

"Chastity enables the soul to breathe a pure air in the foulest places; continence makes her strong, no matter in what condition the body may be; her sway over the senses makes her queenly; her light and peace render her beautiful."

"Children have more need of models than of critics."

"When credulity comes from the heart it does no harm to the intellect."

"Chance generally favors the prudent."

"One can, with dignity, be wife and widow but once."

"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you."

"A reason is often good, not because it is conclusive, but because it is dramatic,—because it has the stamp of him who urges it, and is drawn from his own resources. For there are arguments ex homine as well as ad hominem."

"Certain critics resemble closely those people who when they would laugh show ugly teeth."

"Madness is an illness of the brain, not of the mind."

"Luminous words, like those drops of light we see in fireworks."

"And perhaps there is no advice to give a writer more important than this: — Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure."

"You want to talk to someone: first open your ears."

"In such times, if you want neither to lie nor to wound, you are reduced to being silent."

"Melancholy: when we have sorrows without a name."

"I would fain coin wisdom,—mould it, I mean, into maxims, proverbs, sentences, that can easily be retained and transmitted."

"It is better to be concerned with being than with nothingness. Dream therefore of what you still have rather than what you have lost."

"When a truth is better conceived through abstraction, use the abstraction; if not, don't."

"Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision."

"It is not light that burns, that purifies, that consumes, that divides, and that recomposes; it is fire. And this fire we are talking about always follows light."

"Reason does not reason. It goes straight to the fact or the consequence."

"When a nation gives birth to a man who is able to produce a great thought, another is born who is able to understand and admire it."

"One must die lovable (if one can)."

"Of what must be said and what must not be said. The importance of knowing."

"Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people."

"Courage (in a soldier) is maintained by a certain anger; anger is a little blind and likes to strike out. And from this follows a thousand abuses, a thousand evils and misfortunes that are impossible to predict in an army during war."

"Retreat often into your sphere, rest yourself in your center, plunge yourself into your element: good advice, which must be remembered."

"Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself."

"There is nothing perfectly true for man; I mean in human opinions. Just like there is nothing perfectly round."

"Nothing is better than a justified enthusiasm."

"Let us look for our light in our feelings. There is a warmth in them that contains many clarities."

"You go to truth by way of poetry and I go to poetry by way of truth."

"Neither in the arts, nor in logic, nor in life should an idea by in any way treated as a thing."

"Half myself mocks the other half."

"A frightening thing, which is perhaps true: "old men want to survive.""

"You want to explain everything by the facts that are known to you. But the facts that are not known to you? What do they say?"

"To be pathetic when we cry, we must cry without wanting to and without knowing it."

"To write his views or his observations, his ideas, but not his judgments. Our judgments limit our views of things. Some enclosures, but no walls. The man who always write his judgments places before his eyes the calpe and abyla. He goes no further and creates a nec plus ultra. Thus, in the study of wisdom, many views and few judgments."

"In order to know men, something must be chanced. Who risks himself of nothing knows nothing."

"Logic works, metaphysics contemplates."