“Time, dear friend, time brings round opportunity; opportunity is the martingale of man. The more we have ventured the more we gain, when we know how to wait.”

We must never expect discretion in first love: it is accompanied by such excessive joy that unless the joy is allowed to overflow, it will choke you.

I came to Paris with four écus in my pocket, and I’d have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.

Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.

Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.

There are people who are willing to suffer and swallow their tears at leisure, and God will no doubt reward them in heaven for their resignation; but those who have the will to struggle strike back at fate in retaliation for the blows they receive.

Truly generous men are always ready to become sympathetic when their enemy’s misfortune surpasses the limits of their hatred.

The friends we have lost do not repose under the ground, they are buried deep in our hearts. It has been thus ordained that they may always accompany us.

Pain, thou art not an evil.

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.

Haste is a poor counselor.

Great is truth. Fire cannot burn it nor water drown it.

Oh! The good times when we were so unhappy.

Moral wounds have this peculiarity – they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.

The wretched and miserable should turn to their Saviour first, yet they do not hope in Him until all other hope is exhausted.

I don’t know how you are so familiar to me-or why it feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that I have known you before, I have loved you before-in another time, a different place, some other existence.

Souls do not have calendars or clocks, nor do they understand the notion of time or distance. They only know it feels right to know one other.

In a sea of strangers, you’ve longed to know me. Your life spent sailing to my shores.

Nobody can guarantee the real terms per pupil funding increase. In the Labour party’s manifesto we know the figures don’t add up.

Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.

Perhaps our own opposition to even the level of European integration we have now, let alone any more, is well known.

We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act. About the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because, and I am not making this up, he had a pet cat.

I lived in countries that had no democracy. so I don’t find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don’t know what it is not to have freedom.