| |
| A man only understands what is akin to some things already in his mind. | 1 |
| A multitude of sparks yields but a sorry light. | 2 |
| A narrow faith has much more energy than an enlightened one. | 3 |
| A progress of society on the one hand, a decline of souls on the other. | 4 |
| About Jesus we must believe no one but himself. | 5 |
| Absolute individualism is an absurdity. | 6 |
| Action is but coarsened thought. | 7 |
| An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains. | 8 |
| Analysis kills spontaneity, just as grain, once it is ground into flour, no longer springs and germinates. | 9 |
| Art is simply a bringing into relief of the obscure thought of Nature. | 10 |
| At the sight of a man we too say to ourselves, Let us be men. | 11 |
| Barbarism is no longer at our frontiers; it lives side by side with us. | 12 |
| Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of treason, raised to the second power, woman is at once the delight and the terror of man. | 13 |
| Christianity has not yet penetrated into the whole heart of Jesus. | 14 |
| Christianity is salvation by the conversion of the will; humanism by the enlightenment of the mind. | 15 |
| Christianity is the apotheosis of grief, the marvellous transmutation of suffering into triumph, the death of death and the defeat of sin. | 16 |
| Christianity is the practical demonstration that holiness and pity, justice and mercy, may meet together and become one in man and in God. | 17 |
| Civilisation tends to corrupt men, as large towns vitiate the air. | 18 |
| Clever people will recognise and tolerate nothing but cleverness. | 19 |
| Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing. | 20 |
| |
|
|
| |
| Common-sense is calculation applied to life. | 21 |
| Common-sense is the measure of the possible; it is calculation applied to life. | 22 |
| Democracy has done a wrong to everything that is not first-rate. | 23 |
| Doubt is the abettor of tyranny. | 24 |
| Doubting the reality of love leads to doubting everything. | 25 |
| Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison. | 26 |
| Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world, while at the same time it detaches us from it. | 27 |
| Each man begins the world afresh, and the last man repeats the blunders of the first. | 28 |
| Every loving woman is a priestess of the past. | 29 |
| Every real need is appeased and every vice stimulated by satisfaction. | 30 |
| For a republic you must have men. | 31 |
| From every spot on earth we are equally near heaven and the infinite. | 32 |
| Great men are the true men, the men in whom Nature has succeeded. | 33 |
| Great souls care only for what is great. | 34 |
| Happiness is nothing but the conquest of God through love. | 35 |
| He who ceases to grow greater grows smaller. | 36 |
| He who does not advance falls backward. | 37 |
| He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous. | 38 |
| Health is the first of all liberties, and happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health. | 39 |
| Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over fear; fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation and death…. It is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage. | 40 |
| If we wish to do good to men, we must pity and not despise them. | 41 |
| In Catholic countries religion and liberty exclude each other; in Protestant ones they accept each other. | 42 |
| In choosing friends, we should choose those whose qualities are innate, and their virtues virtues of the temperament. | 43 |
| Intellect is aristocratic; charity is democratic. | 44 |
| It is better to be lost than to be saved all alone. | 45 |
| It is not history which educates the conscience; it is conscience which educates history. | 46 |
| It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is. | 47 |
| Knowledge, love, power, constitute the complete life. | 48 |
| Liberty raises us to the gods; holiness prostrates us on the ground. | 49 |
| Life alone can rekindle life. | 50 |
| Life is but a tissue of habits. | 51 |
| Life passes through us; we do not possess it. | 52 |
| Man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart. | 53 |
| Man is nothing but contradiction; the less he knows it the more dupe he is. | 54 |
| Man is only what he becomes, but he becomes only what he is. | 55 |
| Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything; makes everything vulgar, and every truth false. | 56 |
| Men feed themselves rather upon illusion than upon truth. | 57 |
| Never mind the future: be what you ought to be; the rest is God’s affair. | 58 |
| Nothing is more characteristic of a man than his behaviour towards fools. | 59 |
| Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement. | 60 |
| Order is a great man’s need, and his true wellbeing. | 61 |
| Order is power. | 62 |
| Reflection dissolves reverie and burns her delicate wings. | 63 |
| Religion is a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its roots and practical in its fruits. | 64 |
| Religion is not a method, but a life. | 65 |
| Respect for others is the first condition of “savoir-vivre.” | 66 |
| Reverie is the Sunday of thought. | 67 |
| Sacrifice still exists everywhere, and everywhere the elect of each generation suffers for the salvation of the rest. | 68 |
| Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies. | 69 |
| Sad natures are most tolerant of gaiety. | 70 |
| So long as a man is capable of self-renewal he is a living being. | 71 |
| Society lives by faith, and develops by science. | 72 |
| Society rests upon conscience, not upon science. | 73 |
| Style is what gives value and currency to thought. | 74 |
| Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion. | 75 |
| Tears are the symbol of the inability of the soul to restrain its emotion and retain its self-command. | 76 |
| The age of great men is going; the epoch of the anthill, of life in multiplicity, is beginning. | 77 |
| The best path through life is the highway. | 78 |
| The complete spiritualisation of the animal element in nature is the task of our species. | 79 |
| The divine state, “par excellence,” is silence and repose. | 80 |
| The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes. | 81 |
| The germs of all things are in every heart. | 82 |
| The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. | 83 |
| The more a man lives, the more he suffers. | 84 |
| The only substance properly so called is the soul. | 85 |
| The only true principle for humanity is justice. | 86 |
| The Promised Land is the land where one is not. | 87 |
| The soul moralises the past in order not to be demoralised by it, and finds in the crucible of experience only the gold that she herself has poured into it. | 88 |
| The virtue of sex is the occasion of mutual teaching; the woman preaching love in the ears of justice, and the man justice in the ears of love. | 89 |
| The world grows more majestic, but man grows less. | 90 |
| The world is but an allegory; the idea is more real than the fact. | 91 |
| There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute. | 92 |
| There is no respect for others without humility in one’s self. | 93 |
| Thought is like opium: it can intoxicate us while it leaves us broad awake. | 94 |
| Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost the same moment. | 95 |
| To be misunderstood is the cross and bitterness of life. | 96 |
| To depersonalise man is the dominant drift of our epoch. | 97 |
| To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent | 98 |
| To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius. | 99 |
| To judge is to see clearly, to care for what is just. | 100 |
| To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. | 101 |
| To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. | 102 |
| To live is to achieve a perpetual triumph. | 103 |
| To repel one’s cross is to make it heavier. | 104 |
| To the Hindu the world is the dream of Brahma. | 105 |
| To understand things we must once have been in them, and then have come out of them. | 106 |
| True humility is contentment. | 107 |
| True love is that which enobles the personality, fortifies the heart, and sanctifies the existence. | 108 |
| True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result. | 109 |
| We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things. | 110 |
| We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. | 111 |
| We have all a cure of souls, and every man is a priest. | 112 |
| What governs men is the fear of truth, except such as is useful to them. | 113 |
| What we do not understand we have no business to judge. | 114 |
| Will localises us; thought universalises us. | 115 |
| Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility. | 116 |
| Woman is at once the delight and the terror of man. | 117 |
| Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. | 118 |
| Women wish to be loved, not because they are pretty, or good, or well-bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves. | 119 |
| |
