Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

Heaven, on occasion, half opens its arms to us; and that is the great moment.

Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.

To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

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.

This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.