One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.

The memory of an absent person shines in the deepest recesses of the heart, shining the more brightly the more wholly its object has vanished: a light on the horizon of the despairing, darkened spirit; a star gleaming in our inward night.

And if it happened to be a Christmas-night when the great bell seemed to rattle in its throat as it called the faithful to the midnight mass, there was such an indescribable air of life spread over the sombre facade that the great door-way looked as if it were swallowing the entire crowd, and the rose-window staring at them.

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.

Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.