SundayNov 01, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word, he must be able to simplify his duties, his business and his life.
Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.
A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat: that is progress.
Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.
Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.
Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and in lending oneself to the universal delusion without becoming its dupe.
Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be outraged by silence.
Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority: it is the highest summit of art and of life.
A belief is not true because it is useful.
To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.
To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.
He who is silent is forgotten; he who does not advance falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed; out distanced, crushed; he who ceases t grow becomes smaller; he who leaves off, gives up; the condition of standing still is the beginning of the end.
Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring ...
Accept life, and you must accept regret.
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.
Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.
Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.
If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions such a man is a mere article of the world's furniture a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being an echo, not a voice.
We must dare to be happy, and dare to confess it, regarding ourselves always as the depositories, not as the authors of our own joy.
To curse grief is easier than to bless it, but to do so is to fall back into the point of view of the earthly, the carnal, the natural man. By what has Christianity subdued the world if not by the apotheosis of grief, by its marvelous transmutation of suf
The great artist is the simplifier.
An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.
The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.
It is dangerous to abandon one's self to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.
Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.
Charm: the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
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