Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men

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.

As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.

Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Logic ignores the almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.

War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.