The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.

Pay bad people with your goodness; fight their hatred with your kindness. Even if you do not achieve a victory over other people, you will conquer yourself.

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.

Every living being seeks instinctively to complete itself.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

The musician of the present day, not being able to give us what is beautiful, torments himself to give us what is new.

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.