Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Friendship is the ideal; friends are the reality; reality always remains far apart from the ideal.
I look at what I have not and think myself unhappy; others look at what I have and think me happy.
The chief cause of our misery is less the violence of our passions than the feebleness of our virtues.
Since unhappiness excites interest, many, in order to render themselves interesting, feign unhappiness.
The philosopher spends in becoming a man the time which the ambitious man spends in becoming a personage.
We often experience more regret over the part we have left, than pleasure over the part we have preferred.
The folly which we might have ourselves committed is the one which we are least ready to pardon in another.
There are people who laugh to show their fine teeth; and there are those who cry to show their good hearts.
Reason guides but a small part of man, and the rest obeys feeling, true or false, and passion, good or bad.
The vital air of friendship is composed of confidence. Friendship perishes in proportion as this air diminishes.
Say nothing good of yourself, you will be distrusted; say nothing bad of yourself, you will be taken at your word.
What is experience? A poor little hut constructed from the ruins of the palace of gold and marble called our illusions.
Morality is the fruit of religion: to desire the former without the latter is to desire an orange without an orange-tree.
When orators and auditors have the same prejudices, those prejudices run a great risk of being made to stand for incontestable truths.
A face which is always serene possesses a mysterious and powerful attraction: sad hearts come to it as to the sun to warm themselves again.
The habit of prayer communicates a penetrating sweetness to the glance, the voice, the smile, the tears,--to all one says, or does, or writes.
As long as we love, we lend to the beloved object qualities of mind and heart which we deprive him of when the day of misunderstanding arrives.
That which we know is but little; that which we have a presentiment of is immense; it is in this direction that the poet outruns the learned man.
The man abandoned by his friends, one after another, without just cause, will acquire, the reputation of being hard to please, changeable, ungrateful, unsociable.
What is slander? A verdict of "guilty" pronounced in the absence of the accused, with closed doors, without defence or appeal, by an interested and prejudiced judge.
History, if thoroughly comprehended, furnishes something of the experience which a man would acquire who should be a contemporary of all ages and a fellow citizen of all peoples.
The Holy Scriptures praise the dew of the morning and the dew of the evening; ros matutinum, ros serotinum! Happy is he who possesses the gift of tears! when young, he will bear flowers; when old, fruit!
The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.
Like those statues which must be made larger than "nature" in order that, viewed from below, or from a distance, they may appear to be of the "natural" size, certain truths must be "strained" in order that the public may form a just idea of them.
We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.