“Passion may be false, trivial or unnatural, but, if violent enough, is not without some trace of grandeur.”

“There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

“But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.”

“It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no moral element enters.”

“Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur”

“Passion cannot be beautiful without excess; one either loves too much or not enough.”