Sacrifice may be a flower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this flower that virtue set forth on its travels.

To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.

There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.

Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.

At every crossway on the path that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear that the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight that nature drags along.