There is within us a moral instinct which forbids us to rejoice at the death of even an enemy.

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.

On an exhausted field, only weeds grow.

The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.

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.

Evidently the merit depends on the result of the work.