The folly which we might have ourselves committed is the one which we are least ready to pardon in another.

As long as we love, we lend to the beloved object qualities of mind and heart which we deprive him of when the day of misunderstanding arrives.

Like those statues which must be made larger than "nature" in order that, viewed from below, or from a distance, they may appear to be of the "natural" size, certain truths must be "strained" in order that the public may form a just idea of them.

God is a shower to the heart burned up with grief; God is a sun to the face deluged with tears.

The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.

That which we know is but little; that which we have a presentiment of is immense; it is in this direction that the poet outruns the learned man.

Friendship is the ideal; friends are the reality; reality always remains far apart from the ideal.