So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.

True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.

M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.

Here we stop. Upon the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, his finger on his lip.

A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.

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