The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.

Morality has been conceived up to the present in a very narrow spirit, as obedience to a law, as inner struggle between opposite laws. As for me, I declare that when I do good I obey no one, I fight no battle and win no victory. The cultivated person has only to follow the delicious incline of his or her inner impulses. Be beautiful and then do at each moment whatever your heart may inspire you to do. This is the whole of morality.

Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him.

The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery.