God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger.

Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.

The tomb is not a blind alley: it is a thoroughfare. It closes on the twilight. It opens on the dawn.

The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones.

Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?