Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.
When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in balance with the whole work of God.
Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living--something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and charm.
Unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct ... hold us to the earth and dictate the relatively good and useful.
Knowledge, love, power-there is the complete life.
Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind.
To repel one's cross is to make it heavier.
Happiness has no limits, because God has neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is nothing but the conquest of God through love.
Great men are the real men, in them nature has succeeded.
Are we not all shipwrecked,...condemned to death?... However impatient our neighbours make us, however much indignation our race arouses, we are all bound together, and the companions of a chain-gang have everything to lose by mutual insults.
A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.
I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness?
To know where one is going and what one wishes - this is order ... to organize one's life to distribute one's time ... all this belong to and is included in the word order.
There are 2 sorts of pride: one in which we approve others, the other in which we cannot accept ourselves.
About Jesus we must believe no one but himself.
Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner in which he behaves toward fools.
Sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy.
He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature... is less liable than anyone else to miss and waste life.
To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.
Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art.
[I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.
Every situation is an equilibrium of forces; every life is a struggle between opposing forces working within the limits of a certain equilibrium
One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.
Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius.
I wonder whether I should gain anything by the attempt to assume a character which is not mine. My wavering manner, born of doubt and scruple, has at least the advantage of rendering all the different shades of my thought, and of being sincere. If it were to become terse, affirmative, resolute, would it not be a mere imitation?
