Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

France is revolutionary or she is nothing at all. The revolution of1789 is her political religion.

Enthusiasm is the intoxication of earnestness.

If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad? The most famous men created arms, laws, and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples, dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world; and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls.

Argument should be polite as well as logical.

It is admirable to die the victim of one's faith; it is sad to die the dupe of one's ambition.