Each year, it is necessary to respire, to take breath again, to revive ourselves at the great living sources that forever keep their eternal freshness. Where can we find them if not at the cradle of our race, on the sacred summits from where descend the Indus and the Ganges....?

The indifference of men, far more than their tyranny, is the torment of women.

What manly eloquence could produce such an effect as woman's silence?

Our esteem is apt to be given where we know the least.

The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.

He who knows how to be poor knows everything.

Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.