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| A man belongs to his age and race, even when he acts against them. | 1 |
| Dans la morale, comme l’art, dire n’est rien, faire est tout—In morals as in art, talking is nothing, doing is all. | 2 |
| Democracy is the most powerful solvent of military organisation. The latter is founded on discipline; the former on the negation of discipline. | 3 |
| God is the number, the weight, and the measure which makes the world harmonious and eternal. | 4 |
| God is the reason of those who have no reason. | 5 |
| Had religion been a mere chimæra, it would long ago have been extinct; were it susceptible of a definite formula, that formula would long ago have been discovered. | 6 |
| He who obeys is almost always better than he who commands. | 7 |
| If the true did not possess an objective value, human curiosity would have died out centuries ago. | 8 |
| In morals, as in art, saying is nothing, doing is all. | 9 |
| In regard to virtue, each one finds certainty by consulting his own heart. | 10 |
| Is it right to despair, and shall truth make us sad? | 11 |
| It is far from universally true that to get a thing you must aim at it. There are some things which can only be gained by renouncing them. | 12 |
| It is for the sake of him (the virtuous man) and of those like him that the earth exists and maintains itself in being. | 13 |
| Le bon sens vulgaire est un mauvais juge quand il s’agit des grandes choses—Good common-sense is a bad judge when it is a question of high matters. | 14 |
| Les plus grands hommes d’une nation sont ceux qu’elle met à mort—The greatest men of a nation are those whom it puts to death. | 15 |
| Like a large heart overflowing with an impotent and vague love, the universe is ceaselessly in the agony of transformation. | 16 |
| Man is like the worker at Gobelins, who weaves on the wrong side a tapestry of which he does not see the design. | 17 |
| Man lives where he acts. | 18 |
| Many and many a heart of woman, who has not uttered a word during her whole life, has felt more truly and intensely than the poet that has sung most sweetly. | 19 |
| Moses and Mahomet were not men of speculation, but men of action; and it is the stress they laid upon the latter that has given them the power they wield over the destinies of mankind. | 20 |
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| Nature acts towards us like an Oriental potentate with Mamelukes under him, whom he employs for some mysterious purpose, but to whom he never shows himself in person. | 21 |
| No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifices; no one ever escapes without a stain from the struggle of life. | 22 |
| Pressure alone causes water to rise and directs it. | 23 |
| Restraint and obstruction (la gêne) constitute the principle of movement. | 24 |
| So soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to man, I see no limit to the horizon which opens before him. | 25 |
| The family virtues are indispensable to the proper continuance of a society. | 26 |
| The glory of philosophy lies not in solving the problem, but in putting it. | 27 |
| The good nature of the dog is not discouraged, although it often brings upon him only rebuffs; the abusive treatment of man never offends him, because he loves man. | 28 |
| The great agent of the march of the world is pain, the unsatisfied being that craves for development and is ill at ease in the process. | 29 |
| The greatest men of a nation are those whom it puts to death. | 30 |
| The life of an egoist is a tissue of inconsistencies, of actions that, from his own point of view, are absurd and foolish. | 31 |
| The obscure is what transcends us, and what imposes itself upon us by transcending us. | 32 |
| The question of education is for the modern world a question of life or death, a question on which depends the future. | 33 |
| The universe is that great egoist that decoys us by the grossest bird-calls. | 34 |
| The virtue of man is, in a word, the great proof of God. | 35 |
| There is no object of desire the supreme vanity of which we do not recognise and confess when once we have embraced it. | 36 |
| True influence is latent influence. | 37 |
| Virtue is an absolute Amen, uttered with reference to the obscure ends that Providence pursues through us. | 38 |
| When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things from it. | 39 |
| Without great men nothing can be done. | 40 |
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