These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.

Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.

We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination.

Scepticism, that dry caries of the intelligence.

Daring is the price of progress. All splendid conquests are the prize of boldness, more or less.

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

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.