All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.