Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates.

One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.

Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.

Let us say it now: to be blind and to be loved, is indeed, upon this earth where nothing is complete, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness.

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.