When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.
Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.
However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?
Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.
As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.
Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking .. questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world.
A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.