“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.”

“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.”

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”

“Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”

“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”

“The form that the love of religion takes in the soul differs a great deal according to the circumstances of out lives. Some circumstances prevent the very birth of this love; others kill it before it has been able to grow very strong. In affliction some men, in spite of themselves, develop a hatred and contempt for religions because the cruelty, pride, or corruption of certain of its ministers have made them suffer. There are others who have been reared from their earliest youth in surroundings impregnated with a spirit of this sort. We must conclude that in such cases, by God's mercy, the love of our neighbor and the love of the beauty of the world, if they are sufficiently strong and pure, will be enough to raise the soul to any height.”

“The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be.”