The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
A library implies an act of faith.
Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.
A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.
Love that is not jealous is neither true nor pure.
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.
The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
