“The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.”

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

The more I see of men the more I like dogs.

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.

Speech happens to not be his language.

Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them.

To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.

Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased.

The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.

Love is the whole history of a woman’s life, it is but an episode in a man’s.

When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.

The breaking wave and the muscle as it contracts obey the same law. Delicate line gathers the body’s total strength in a bold balance. Shall my soul meet so severe a curve, journeying on its way to form?

The bird building her home on your windowsill has every nest destroyed before. The spider that is delicately weaving a masterpiece has had every single thread broken before. And despite it all, they try again.

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

She leads us through their unknown world, her gift of language rising up like a delicate string of necessary lights.

To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero.

Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism.

When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.