When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.

The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!

What makes night within us may leave stars.

A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest.

A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface!