There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

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.

Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

I believe in religion against the religious; in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.