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Du fond de l'ombre où nous sommes et où vous êtes, vous ne voyez pas beaucoup plus distinctement que nous les radieuses et lointaines portes de l'éden. Seulement les prêtres se trompent. Ces portes saintes ne sont pas derrière nous, mais devant nous.
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Evil. Mistrust those who rejoice at it even more than those who do it.
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We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present.
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The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.
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À quelle heure, s'il vous plaît?
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In every French village there is now a lighted torch, the schoolmaster; and a mouth trying to blow it out, the priest.
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In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with all the objects of creation, there is a whole great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to human ethics.
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The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
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Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision?
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A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.
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Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
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Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.
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One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.
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Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.
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Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.
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Vous créez un frisson nouveau.
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They had done him the honor to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet.
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Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.
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As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
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...there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables.
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"I should hope so," Laigle replied, "for my coat and I live comfortably together. It has assumed all my wrinkles, does not hurt me anywhere, has moulded itself on my deformities, and is complacent to all my movements, and 1 only feel its presence because it keeps me warm."
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Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
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The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal.
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He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality.