"Sorrow is a fruit. God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it."

"Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it."

"Caution is the eldest child of wisdom."

"The principle is twofold, do not forget. The book, as a book, belongs to the author, but as a thought, it belongs " the word is not too extreme " to the human race. All intelligences, all minds, are eligible, all own it. If one of these two rights, the right of the writer and the right of the human mind, were to be sacrificed, it would certainly be the right of the writer, because the public interest is our only concern, and that must take precedence in anything that comes before us."

"Thought is the labour of the intellect reverie is its pleasure."

"In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet."

"My tastes are aristocratic my actions democratic."

"Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, education."

"Where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the junction between those who think and those who suffer; this barricade is made neither of paving stones, nor of timbers, nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a mound of sorrows. Here misery encounters the ideal. Here day embraces night, and says: I will die with you and you will be born again with me. From the heavy embrace of all desolations springs faith. Sufferings bring their agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and immortality will mingle and make up our death.Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn."

"It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her."

"He loved books, books are cold but safe friends."

"Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."

"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."

"What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky."

"Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth."

"Taste is the common sense of genius."

"Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen."

"Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters."

"To love is to act."

"Genius is a promontory jutting out of the infinite."

"A library implies an act of faith."

". . . for men felt therein the presence of that great human thing which is called law, and that great divine thing which is called justice."

"Inspiration and genius - one and the same."

"You were right to come to see a dying man. It is right that these moments should have witnesses. Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight."

"People do not lack strength; they lack will."

"Good night! Good night!Far flies the light;But still God's loveShall shine above,Making all bright,Good night! Good night!"

"Proverty and wealth are comparative sins."

"Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary."

"Love is the only future God offers."

"Fashions have done more harm than revolutions."

"A war between Europeans is a civil war."

"Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout to them: "You are tearing up the pavements of hell! They might reply: "That is because our barricade is made of good intentions."

"Monsieur Bienvenu was simply a man who accepted these mysterious questions...and who had in his soul a deep respect for the mystery which enveloped them."

"A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in--what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars."

"Virtue has a veil, vice a mask."

"When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right."

"He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy . . . who had left upon every field of victory in Europe drops of that same blood which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown grey before his time in discipline and in command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by powder, his forehead wrinkled by the cap, in the barracks, in the camp, in the bivouac, in the ambulance, and who after twenty years had returned from the great wars with his cheek scarred, his face smiling, simple, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her."

"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."

"Everyone has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not said to a cat, "Do come in! There are men who, when an incident stands half-open before them, have the same tendency to halt in indecision between two resolutions, at the risk of getting crushed through the abrupt closing of the adventure by fate. The over-prudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes incur more danger than the audacious."

"My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic."

"It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awake that slumbering Progress."

"She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft."

"One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will."

"He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends."

"There are many lovely women but no perfect ones."

"Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just."

"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."

"To breath the air of Paris preserves the soul."

"Sin is a gravitation."

"He was Antinous, wild. You would have said, seeing the thoughtful reflection of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, been through the revolutionary apocalypse. He knew its tradition like an eyewitness. He knew every little detail of that great thing.A pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal."