God blesses man, not for having found but for having sought.

A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion.

Sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow.

No religion but blasphemes a little.

The wise man is he who knows when and how to stop

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.

We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.