Oh, how sweet it is to pity the fate of an enemy who can no longer threaten us!

Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.

An example is often a deceptive mirror, and the order of destiny, so troubling to our thoughts, is not always found written in things past.

Danger breeds best on too much confidence.

A true king is neither husband nor father; he considers his throne and nothing else.

I see, I know, I believe, I am undeceived.

Brave men are brave from the very first.

My reason, it's true, controls my feelings, but whatever its authority, it doesn't rule them so much as tyrannize them.

In the service of Caesar, everything is legitimate.

I agree to, or rather aspire to, my doom.

A first impulse was never a crime.

My sweetest hope is to lose hope.

How delicious is pleasure after torment!

It is a crime against the State to be powerful enough to commit one.

To die for one's country is such a worthy fate that all compete for so beautiful a death.

They who overcome their desires once can overcome them always.

I would not like a king who could obey.

I have deserved neither so much honor or so much disgrace.

He who allows me to rule is in fact my master.

He who plays advisor is no longer ambassador.

It takes good memory to keep up a lie.

Severity is allowable where gentleness has no effect.

He who is hated by all can not expect to live long.

As great as kings may be, they are what we are: they can err like other men.

It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.

Clemency is the noblest trait which can reveal a true monarch to the world.

In recounting our woes, we often soothe them.

Flee an enemy who knows your weakness.

One ought to have a good memory when he has told a lie.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others.

Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them. There they concentrate, little by little, all that is purest and most attractive in them without loss and without danger of subsequent corruption.

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other.

It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music - these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.