Great Throughts Treasury

"When I go down to the grave I can say I have finished my day's work. But I cannot say I have finished my life. My day's work will begin again the next morning."

"God always interior to man, and unyielding, He, the true conscience to the false; a prohibition to the spark to extinguish itself; an order to the ray to remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the real absolute when it is confronted with the fictitious absolute; humanity imperishable; that splendid phenomenon, the most beautiful perhaps of our interior wonders."

"A fixed idea ends in madness or heroism."

"Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes."

"Love has no middle term; it destroys or its saves."

"One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas."

"The huge concentric waves of universal life are shoreless. The starry sky that we study is but a partial appearance. We grasp but a few meshes of the vast network of existence."

"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."

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; when you have laboriously accomplished your daily tasks, go to sleep in peace. God is awake."

"The indivisible is not to be put into compartments. Every fact is a logarithm; one added term ramifies it until it is thoroughly transformed. In the general aspects of things, the great lines of creation take shape and arrange themselves into groups; beneath lies the unfathomable. Which of our methods of measuring could we apply to this eddying mass that is the universe? In the presence of the profundities our sole ability is to dream. Our conception, quickly winded, cannot follow creation, that vast breath."

"The nearer my approach to the end, the plainer is the sound of immortal symphonies of worlds which invite me. It is wonderful yet simple. It is a fairy tale; it is history. For half a century I have been translating my thoughts into prose and verse; history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode and song; all of these I have tried. But I feel that I haven’t given utterance to the thousandth part of what lies within me. When I go to the grave I can say as others have said, “My day’s work is done.” But I cannot say, “My life is done.” My day’s work will recommence the next morning. the tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. It closes upon the twilight, but opens upon the dawn."

"The whole sum of God that there is on earth, within all men, concentrates itself in a single cry to affirm the soul."

"We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd; to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion, to remove the vermin from the garden of God."

"Thought is the labor of intellect, reverie is its pleasure."

"A character, as well as a rock, may have holes worn into it by drops of water."

"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil."

"A counting-house passes away; a school endures."

"A day will come when markets, open to trade, and minds, open to ideas, will become the sole battlefield."

"A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas. A day will come when the bullets and bombs are replaced by votes, by universal suffrage, by the venerable arbitration of a great supreme senate which will be to Europe what Parliament is to England, the Diet to Germany, and the Legislative Assembly to France. A day will come when a canon will be a museum-piece, as instruments of torture are today. And we will be amazed to think that these things once existed! A day will come when we shall see those two immense groups, the United States of America and the United States of Europe, facing one another, stretching out their hands across the sea, exchanging their products, their arts, their works of genius, clearing up the globe, making deserts fruitful, ameliorating creation under the eyes of the Creator, and joining together, to reap the well-being of all, these two infinite forces, the fraternity of men and the power of God."

"A dogma is a dark chamber."

"A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing."

"A good mayor is a good thing. Are you afraid of the good you might do"

"A great artist is a great man in a great child."

"A hatred for educating the children of the people was dogma. What good was a little learning?"

"A head that Raphael would have given to Mary, on a neck that Jean Goujon would have given to Venus."

"A laudable distrust is an attribute of wisdom."

"A library implies an act of faith"

"A little girl without a doll is almost as unfortunate and quite as impossible as a woman without children."

"A man's philosophy is the bed he lies on."

"A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them."

"A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking."

"A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry"

"A poet is a world enclosed in a man."

"A prince is nothing beside a principle."

"A right is not to be treated as a favor."

"A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement - in a word, with more renunciation than you care for - and so you flee the contagion."

"A secret is a net; let one mesh drop, and the whole falls to pieces."

"A skeptic adhering to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man."

"A social deformity perhaps still more hideous than the evil rich: the evil poor"

"A soul for a piece of bread. Misery makes the offer; society accepts."

"A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea."

"A superb flame is the visible will. The eye of man is so made that one perceives his virtue in it. Our eyes reveal the quantity of man there is in us. We assert ourselves by the light which lies under our eyelids. Small consciences blink their eyes, great ones dart lightning. If nothing glows beneath the lids, it is because nothing in the brain thinks, nothing in the heart loves."

"A thing that smoked and clacked along on the Seine, making the noise of a swimming dog, came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV; it was a machine of little value, a kind of toy, the daydream of a visionary, a utopia -- a steamboat. The Parisians regarded the useless thing with indifference."

"A type does not reproduce any man in particular; it cannot be exactly superposed upon any individual; it sums up and concentrates under one human form a whole family of characters and minds. A type is no abridgement: it is a condensation."

"A war between Europeans is a civil war."

"About Gilliatt (the hero): He added to strength, which is physical, energy, which is moral force."

"About Notre-Dame: a vast symphony in stone."

"About the Middle Ages: In those days, they saw everything thus, without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without a magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented, either for material things or for the things of the spirit."

"Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light."

"Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two."