What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?

Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.

Like evil, sublimity is also contagious.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.

Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.