He always smiles, even when contemplating nothing good.

I go to church because I am a skeptic in regard to my own skepticism.

If the infinity of the sea may call out thus, perhaps when a man is growing old, calls come to him, too, from another infinity still darker and more deeply mysterious; and the more he is wearied by life the dearer are those calls to him.

Wealth is not a hindrance, but rather a help towards attaining a proper standing in a chosen field of activity. I confess that as far as I am concerned, it has done me some service as it preserved my character from many a crookedness poverty might have exposed it to.

The sky is one whole, the water another; and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness.

In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading.

But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.