| | "So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless." |
| | "Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do." |
| | "How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself..." |
| | "I am not in the world to care for my life, but for souls." |
| | "To be wicked does not insure prosperity — for the inn did not succeed well." |
| | "A good mayor is a good thing. Are you afraid of the good you can do?" |
| | "The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved." |
| | "To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic." |
| | "A sign of assent being given, with one blow of a hammer he broke the chain riveted to the iron ring at his ankle, then took a rope in his hand, and flung himself into the shrouds. Nobody, at the moment, noticed with what ease the chain was broken. It was only some time afterwards that anybody remembered it." |
| | "We do not comprehend everything, but we insult nothing." |
| | "We blame the Church when it is saturated with intrigues; we despise the spiritual when it is harshly austere to the temporal; but we honour everywhere, the thoughtful man." |
| | "We bow to the man who kneels." |
| | "A faith is a necessity to man. Woe to him who believes nothing." |
| | "A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour." |
| | "To meditate is to labour; to think is to act." |
| | "No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child." |
| | "Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil." |
| | "Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy." |
| | "In our eyes, cenobites are not idlers, nor is the recluse a sluggard." |
| | "To think of the Gloom is a serious thing." |
| | "Without at all invalidating what we have just said, we believe that a perpetual remembrance of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die." |
| | "To mingle with one's life a certain presence of the sepulchre is the law of the wise man, and it is the law of the ascetic. In this relation, the ascetic and the sage tend towards a common centre." |
| | "There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it." |
| | "Those who pray always are necessary to those who never pray. In our view, the whole question is in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer." |
| | "We are for religion against the religions." |
| | "We are of those who believe in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer." |
| | "Laughter is sunshine; it chases winter from the human face." |
| | "There is a way of meeting error while on the road of truth." |
| | "Not seeing people permits us to imagine in them every perfection." |
| | "We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks." |
| | "Those are rare who fall without becoming degraded; there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Misérables . . ." |
| | "Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume." |
| | "A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil." |
| | "Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers." |
| | "A people, like a star, has the right of eclipse. And all is well, provided the light return and the eclipse does not degenerate into night." |
| | "They are willing to die, provided they kill." |
| | "When a man clad by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to make of him also a man clad by the state. Only the colour is the whole question. To be clad in blue is glorious; to be clad in red is disagreeable." |
| | "It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live." |
| | "Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another." |