Heaven is to be at peace with things.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.