...The girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy... Intoxications of life’s morning! Enchanted years! The wing of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have such memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches for the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope wet with rain, with the woman you loved?

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.

It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.

Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority.

The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father.

No man is more unhappy than the one who is never in adversity; the greatest affliction of life is never to be afflicted.