Hope is a delusion; no hand can grasp a wave or a shadow.

It is often our best friends who throw us down.

Joie est mon caractere, C'est la faute a Voltaire; Misere est mon trousseau C'est la faute a Rousseau. [Joy is my character, 'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Misery is my trousseau 'Tis the fault of Rousseau.] - Gavroche

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.

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.

Press on! A better fate awaits thee.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.