True love appears in but one of two ways: either at first sight, which is doubtless an effect of second sight; or else in the gradual fusion of two natures, which is the realization of Plato’s androgyne.
A mother’s heart is an abyss in whose depths forgiveness is always to be found.
The practice of religion sometimes causes a mental ophthalmia.
Life is made up of varied accidents, of alternating griefs and joys. Dante’s Paradise, that changeless blue and sublime expression of the ideal, is to be found but in the soul; and to demand it from the actualities of existence is a luxury against which nature hourly protests.
It is despair, not hope, which gives the real measure of our ambitions. We give ourselves up in secret to the beautiful poems of hope, but grief stands before us, unveiled.
The most ordinary and respectable of men will, when with others, try to appear the rake.
Human justice is, I think, the development of the thought which floats through space.
Through an inexplicable phenomenon, there are many who have hope, but are lacking in faith. Hope is the flower of desire; faith is the fruit of certainty.
A petty work engenders pride, while modesty is born of great achievements.
The problem of eternal beatitude is one whose solution is known but to God. Here below, poets bore their readers to death with their pictures of Paradise.