Man, do you think yours is the only soul? Look around you. Everything that you see quivers with being. Though your thoughts are free, one thing you do not think about: the whole. Beasts have a mind; respect it. Flowers too- look at one. Nature brought forth each petal. There is a mystery that sleeps in metal. Everything feels, and has power over you.

The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet; the second, an imbecile.

When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.

Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world.

How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows.

Nothing is indifferent, nothing is powerless in the universe; an atom might destroy everything, an atom might save everything!

The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the I, under another form, continues the task of existence.