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| A conscience without God is a tribunal without a judge. | 1 |
| Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can, and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys. | 2 |
| Habit, with its iron sinews, clasps and leads us day by day. | 3 |
| It is for truth that God created genius. | 4 |
| Kindness is virtue itself. | 5 |
| La goutte de rosée à l’herbe suspendue, / y réfléchit un ciel aussi vaste, aussi pur, / Que l’immense océan dans ses plaines d’azur—The drop of dew which hangs suspended from the grass-blade reflects a heaven as vast and pure as the ocean does in its wide azure plains. | 6 |
| La passion déprave, mais elle élève aussi—Passion depraves, but it also elevates. | 7 |
| Le cœur de l’homme n’est jamais si inflexible que son esprit—The heart of man is never so inflexible as his intellect. | 8 |
| Le peuple est le cœur du pays—The people is the heart of a country. | 9 |
| Le peuple ne comprend que ce qu’il sent. Les seuls orateurs pour lui sont ceux qui l’émeuvent—The people understand only what they feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them. | 10 |
| Le réel est étroit, le possible est immense—The real is limited, the possible is unlimited. | 11 |
| Les médiocrités croient égaler le génie en dépassant la raison—Men of moderate abilities think to rank as geniuses by outstripping reason. | 12 |
| Les passions personelles se lassent et s’usent; les passions publiques jamais—Private passions tire and exhaust themselves; public ones never. | 13 |
| Les utopies ne sont souvent que des vérités prématuriées—Utopias are often only premature truths. | 14 |
| Man is a fallen god, who remembers heaven, his former dwelling-place. | 15 |
| Passion depraves, but also ennobles. | 16 |
| Poetry is the morning dream of great minds. | 17 |
| Poets and heroes are of the same race; the latter do what the former conceive. | 18 |
| Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history. | 19 |
| Religions are not proved, are not established, are not overthrown, by logic. They are, of all the mysteries of nature and the human mind, the most mysterious and inexplicable; they are of instinct, and not of reason. | 20 |
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| The persistent aspirations of the human race are to society what the compass is to the ship. It sees not the shore, but it guides to it. | 21 |
| Two qualities are demanded of a statesman who would direct any great movement of opinion in which he himself takes a part; he must have a complete understanding of the movement itself, and he must be animated by the same motives as those which inspire the movement. | 22 |
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