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.

Friend is sometimes a word devoid of meaning; enemy, never.

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.