What is grace? It is the inspiration from on high: it is love; it is liberty. Grace is the spirit of law. This discovery of the spirit of law belongs to Saint Paul; and what he calls "grace" from a heavenly point of view, we, from an earthly point, call "rigtheousness."
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Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars-all the beauties of creation.
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When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
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Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?
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From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.
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Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.
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Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
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He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
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Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
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Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Intelligence
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It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion --to rid God of His Maggots.
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How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
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What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!
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There are fathers who do not love their children, but there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
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We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.
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Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.
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Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees
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The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
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Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
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There are obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude. There are noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees. No renown rewards, and no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, and poverty and battlefields which have their heroes.
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Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
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Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.
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To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do.
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A great artist is a great man in a great child.
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To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother.
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When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.
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A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.
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As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of.... In literature, as in all things, ther...
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Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
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The learned man knows that he is ignorant.
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