The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
The soul has illusions as the bird has wings: it is supported by them.
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.
The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone.
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.
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.