He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he held her tightly unconscious of what he was doing. He held her up, though tottering himself. He felt as if his head were filled with smoke; flashes of light slipped through his eyelids; his thoughts vanished; it seemed to him that he was performing a religious act, and that he was committing a profanation. Moreover, he did not feel one passionate desire for this ravishing woman, whose form he felt against his heart. He was lost in love.

Women are more credulous than men.

I am not in the world to care for my life, but for souls.

The repose of darkness is deeper on the water than on the land.

When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.

Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.