Danger gathers upon our path. We cannot afford - we have no right - to look back. We must look forward... The stronger the advocate of monarchical principle a man may be, the more zealously he must now endeavor to fortify the Throne and to give to His Majesty's successor that strength which can only come from the love of a united nation and Empire.
The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---
Of course you want to be rich and famous. It's natural. Wealth and fame are what every man desires. The question is: What are you willing to trade for it?
It is only when men lose their contact with this eternal life-flame, and become merely personal, things in themselves, instead ofthings kindled in the flame, that the fight between man and woman begins.
But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
Man may be considered as having a twofold origin - natural, which is common and the same to all - patronymic, which belongs to the various families of which the whole human race is composed.
Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed be the facts. Finley Peter Dunne There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.
War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.
When men are about to commit, or sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable.
Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.