Your flying wings may smite, but they can never spill.
The cup fulfilled of love, from which my lips are wet;
My heart has far more fire than you can frost to chill,
My soul more love than you can make my soul forget.

Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.

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

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved – loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.

The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.

Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

What Is love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.

Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.

The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.

In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, animosity will be dead, royalty will be dead, and dogmas will be dead; but Man will live. For all there will be but one country—that country the whole earth; for all there will be but one hope—that hope the whole heaven.

When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.

Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it.

Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light.
For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies.
Even the darkest night will end
And the sun will rise.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

He who is not capable of enduring poverty is not capable of being free.

Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.