Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

The peculiarity of sunrise is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the fear we have had.

That men saw his mask, but the bishop saw his face. That men saw his life, but the bishop saw his conscience.

One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to efface.

One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

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.

These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.