To love another person is to see the face of God.

As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.

Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most night.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

God became man, granted. The devil became a woman.

Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.

Philosophy should be an energy; it should find its aim and its effect in the amelioration of mankind.