“ Do we not know that no anxiety, or difficulties, or trouble, or pain, or sorrow, is happiness? What more, then, need we say about these felicities? Does not every man know what they are, and also know that they are the highest good? And yet almost every man seeks in very little things the best felicities; because he thinks that he may have them all if he have that which he then chiefly wishes to obtain. This is, then, what they chiefly wish to obtain, wealth, and dignity, and authority, and this world's glory, and ostentation, and worldly lust. ”

“ Almost all the world takes pleasure in paying small debts; many people show gratitude for trifling, but there is hardly one who does not show ingratitude for great favors.
Nothing is rarer than true good nature; those who think they have it are generally only pliant or weak.
There is no less eloquence in the voice, in the eyes and in the air of a speaker than in his choice of words.
True eloquence consists in saying all that should be, not all that could be said.
There are people whose faults become them, others whose very virtues disgrace them. ”

“ On the other side we have intuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, a flashing glance; something that gazes like the eagle and strikes like lightning, all the mysteries of a profound mind, association with destiny; the river, the plain, the forest, and the hill summoned, and, to some extent, compelled to obey, the despot going so far as even to tyrannize over the battle-field; faith in a star, blended with strategic science, heightening, but troubling it. ”

“ Thus each degree of good fortune which raises us in the world removes us further from truth, because we fear most to wound those whose affection is most useful, and whose dislike is most dangerous. A prince may be the byword of all Europe, yet he alone know nothing of it. I am not surprized; to speak the truth is useful to whom it is spoken, but disadvantageous to those who speak it, since it makes them hated. Now those who live with princes love their own interests more than that of the prince they serve, and thus they take care not to benefit him so as to do themselves a disservice. ”

“ The source of genius is often in ancestry, and the blood of descent is sometimes the prophecy of destiny.
Mirabeau's education was as rough and rude as the hand of his father, who was styled the friend of man, but whose restless spirit and selfish vanity rendered him the persecutor of his wife and the tyrant of all his family. The only virtue he was taught was honor, for by that name in those days they dignified that ceremonious demeanor which was too frequently only the show of probity and the elegance of vice. ”

“ The solitude that I love myself and recommend to others, is chiefly no other than to withdraw my thoughts and affections into myself; to restrain and check, not my steps, but my own cares and desires, resigning all foreign solicitude, and mortally avoiding servitude and obligation, and not so much the crowd of men, as the crowd of business. Local solitude, to say the truth, rather gives me more room, and sets me more at large; I more readily throw myself upon the affairs of state and the world, when I am alone; at the Louvre, and in the bustle of the court, I fold myself within my own skin ”

“ These enjoyments are too keen; such is our weakness that exquisite pleasures become griefs, as if nature feared that we should forget that we are men. Absorbed in my existence, or rather drawn quite out of myself, having neither feeling nor distinct thought, but an indescribable I know not what, which was like that happiness which they say we shall enjoy in the other life, I was all at once recalled to this. I felt unwell, and perceived that I must not linger. I returned to our encampment, where, lying down by the savages, I soon fell into a deep sleep. ”

“ Very often a battle lost is progress gained, and less of glory, more of liberty. The drummer is silent and reason speaks; it is the game of who loses wins. Let us, then, speak of Waterloo coldly from both sides, and render to chance the things that belong to chance, and to God what is God's. What is Waterloo—a victory? No; a quine in the lottery, won by Europe, and paid by France; it was hardly worth while erecting a lion for it.
Waterloo, by the way, is the strangest encounter recorded in history; Napoleon and Wellington are not enemies, but contraries. ”

“ How few I shall need for dying, since so few were needed for living!' But one day human corpses were exhumed from the bosom of Egypt—Egypt that had lived out its period of civilization, and has just lived its period of barbarism! Egypt, where the ancient light, lost so long, is being rekindled, and a rested and rejuvenated Egypt may perhaps soon come and establish herself upon the extinguished torch of our own. Egypt, the living image of her mummies sleeping under the dust of ages, and now awaking to the broad daylight of science in order to reveal the age of the old world to the new! ”

“ LÉLIA AND THE POET [60]
"The prophets are crying in the desert to-day, and no voice answers, for the world is indifferent and deaf: it lies down and stops its ears so as to die in peace. A few scattered groups of weak votaries vainly try to rekindle a spark of virtue. As the last remnants of man's moral power, they will float for a moment about the abyss, then go and join the other wrecks at the bottom of that shoreless sea which will swallow up the world."
"O Lélia, why do you thus despair of those sublime men who aspire to bring virtue back to our iron age? ”

“ There are brave, and fortunate deaths. I have seen death cut the thread of the progress of a prodigious advancement, and in the height and flower of its increase of a certain person, with so glorious an end, that in my opinion his ambitious and generous designs had nothing in them so high and great as their interruption; and he arrived without completing his course, at the place to which his ambition pretended with greater glory than he could himself either hope or desire, and anticipated by his fall the name and power to which he aspir'd, by perfecting his career. ”

“ A love, which his "Lettres à Sophie" has rendered immortal, opened its gates and freed him. He carried off Madame de Monier from her aged husband. The lovers, happy for some months, took refuge in Holland; they were seized there, separated and shut up, the one in a convent and the other in the dungeon of Vincennes.
Love, which, like fire in the veins of the earth, is always detected in some crevice of man's destiny, lighted up in a single and ardent blaze all the passions of Mirabeau. ”

“ This is not the work of the poet who is called to power and destined for glory: he acts upon a grander scale, and can address the superior intellects as well as the general and simple faculties of all men. It is doubtless necessary that the crowd should throng to behold those dramatic works of which you desire to make a national spectacle; but do not hope to become national, if you do not unite in your festivities all those classes of persons and minds whose well-arranged hierarchy raises a nation to its loftiest dignity. Genius is bound to follow human nature in all its developments ”

“ Ideas now crowd and intersect each other in the mind of man, duties multiply in his conscience and obstacles and bonds around his life. Instead of those electric brains, prompt to communicate the spark which they have received; instead of those ardent and simple-minded men, whose projects like Macbeth's "will to hand"—the world now presents to the poet minds like Hamlet's, deep in the observation of those inward conflicts which our classical system has derived from a state of society more advanced than that of the time in which Shakespeare lived. ”

“ How can that be evil which the mind of every man considers to be good, and strives after, and desires to obtain? No, it is not evil; it is the highest good. Why is not power to be reckoned one of the highest goods of this present life? Is that to be esteemed vain and useless which is the most useful of all those worldly things, that is, power? Is good fame and renown [11] to be accounted nothing? No, no. It is not fit that any one account it nothing; for every man thinks that best which he most loves. ”

“ How many times you have appeared to me as the type of the unspeakable agony to which the spirit of inquiry has driven man! With your beauty and your sadness, your weariness and your skepticism, do you not personify the excess of sorrow produced by the abuse of thought? Have you not given up, and as it were prostituted, that moral power, so highly developed by what art, poetry, and science have done for it, to every new impression and error? ”

“ In the intercourse of life, we please more by our faults than by our good qualities.
We are easily consoled at the misfortunes of our friends when they enable us to prove our tenderness for them.
Virtue in woman is often the love of reputation and repose.
He is a truly good man who desires always to bear the inspection of good men.
We frequently do good to enable us with impunity to do evil.
Every one praises his heart, none dare praise their understanding.
He is really wise who is nettled at nothing.
Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. ”

“ Aristides had been just before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas had given up his life for his country before Socrates declared patriotism to be a duty; the Spartans were a sober people before Socrates recommended sobriety; before he had even defined virtue Greece abounded in virtuous men.
But where could Jesus learn, among His competitors, that pure and sublime morality, of which He only hath given us both precept and example? The greatest wisdom was made known amongst the most bigoted fanaticism, and the simplicity of the most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest people on earth. ”

“ Any aggrandizement the nineteenth century may have can not boast of Waterloo as its fountainhead; for only barbarous nations grow suddenly after a victory—it is the transient vanity of torrents swollen by a storm. Civilized nations, especially at the present day, are not elevated or debased by the good or evil fortune of a captain, and their specific weight in the human family results from something more than a battle. Their honor, [230] dignity, enlightenment, and genius are not numbers which those gamblers, heroes, and conquerors can stake in the lottery of battles. ”

“ Lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with nature, but then he knew, and pointed out the several paths that lead to it. He had despised in his younger years the thing called philosophy in the universities, and did all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of men instituted to improve human reason from depraving it by their quiddities, their horrors of the vacuum, their substantial forms, and all those impertinent terms which not only ignorance had rendered venerable, but which had been made sacred by their being ridiculously blended with religion. ”

“ How the Count Bougart of Valence made war on Count Garin of Beaucaire,—war so great, so marvelous, and so mortal that never a day dawned but always he was there, by the gates and walls and barriers of the town, with a hundred knights, and ten thousand men-at-arms, horsemen and footmen: so burned he the count's land, and spoiled his country, and slew his men. Now, the Count Garin de Beaucaire was old and frail, and his good days were gone over. No heir had he, neither son nor daughter, save one young man only ”

“ I have thought that the most essential part in the education of children, and which is seldom regarded in the best families, is to make them sensible of their inability, weakness, and dependence, and, as my husband called it, the heavy yoke of that necessity which nature has imposed upon our species; and that, not only in order to show them how much is done to alleviate the burden of that yoke, but especially to instruct them betimes in what rank Providence has placed them, that they may not presume too far above themselves, or be ignorant of the reciprocal duties of humanity. ”

“ I OF CHRIST AND SOCRATES
I will confess that the majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the Gospel hath its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible are they compared with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book, at once so simple and sublime, should be merely the work of man? Is it possible that the sacred personage, whose history it contains, should be himself a mere man? ”