Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.

These are true felicities. No joy beyond these joys. Love is the only ecstasy, everything else weeps

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

...It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.

As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.

Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most night.

And so, being in Heaven, it was easy for him to lose sight of earth.