Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.

Honour is manly decency. The shame of being found wanting in it means everything to us. Is this, then, the indefinable, the sacred thing?

France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.