“I see what it is that scandalizes you. You consider it great pride for a poor priest to ride an animal which our Saviour once rode. I did so through necessity, I assure you, and not through vanity.”“The faults of women, children, servants, the weak, the indigent, and the ignorant are the fault of husbands, fathers, masters, the strong, the rich, and the learned.”“He knew that belief is healthy, and he sought to counsel and claim the desperate man by pointing out to him the resigned man, and to transform the grief that gazes at a grave by showing it the grief that looks at a star.”“Madame Magloire,” the bishop answered, “you are mistaken; the beautiful is as useful as the useful.” He added, after a moment’s silence, “More so, perhaps.”
“He blessed them and they blessed him, and his house was pointed out to anybody who was in want of anything.”“Still the sheperd ought not to keep aloof from a scabby sheep; but, then what a sheep it was!”
“What enlightened this man was his heart and his wisdom was the product of the light which emanates from it.”“He probably refrained from going too deep into certain problems reserved to some extent for great and terrible minds. There is a sacred horror beneath the portals of the enigma; the gloomy abyss is gaping before you, but something tells you that you must not enter; woe to the man who does so. Geniuses, in the profundities of abstraction and pure speculation, being situated, so to speak, above dogmas, propose their ideas to God; their prayer audaciously offers a discussion, and their adoration interrogates. This is direct religion, full of anxiety and responsibility for the man who attempts to carry the escarpment by storm.”“An ugly appearance, a deformity of instinct, did not trouble him or render him indignant; he was moved, almost softened, by them.”“He also derived from his good deeds that amount of satisfaction which suffices the conscience, and which whispers to you, “You are with God.”“They confound with the constellations of profundity the stars which the duck’s feet make in the soft mud of the pond.”“If you leave that mournful place with thoughts of hatred and anger against your fellow men, you are worthy of pity; if you leave it with thoughts of kindliness, gentleness, and peace, you are worth more than any of us.”
“Nature had only made her a lamb, and religion had made her an angel.”“All these laws, prejudices, facts, men, and things came and went above him, in accordance with the complicated and mysterious movement, which God imprints on civilization, marching over him, and crushing him with something painful in its cruelty, and inexorable in its indifference. Souls which have fallen into the abyss of possible misfortune, hapless men lost in the depths of those limbos into which people no longer look, and the reprobates of the law feel on their heads the whole weight of the human society, so formidable for those outside it, so terrific for those beneath it.”“Morality is truth in bloom; to contemplate leads to action, the absolute ought to be practical; the ideal must be what the soul can eat, drink, and breathe.”“Youth, combined with gentleness, produces on aged people the effect of sun without wind.”
“Assuredly, if the language which a nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, there is a thing still more worthy of attention and study, and that is the language which a wretchedness has spoken.”
And the last I read before leaving: (and one of my favorites)
“The power of a glance has been so abused in love romances that is has been discredited in the end, and a writer dares hardly assert nowadays that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other. And yet that is the way, and the sole way, in which people fall in love; the rest is merely the rest, and comes afterward. Nothing is more real than the mighty shocks which two souls give each other by exchanging this spark.”
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