To contemplate is to look at shadows.
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.
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.
Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.
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.
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.
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.
One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.
Liberation is not deliverance.
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
Despotism is a long crime.
When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
Blessed be Providence which has given to each his toy: the doll to the child, the child to the woman, the woman to the man, the man to the devil!
Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.
