Alphonse de Lamartine
Fiction is the microscope of truth.Collection: Fiction
Every time that a people which has long crouched in slavery and ignorance is moved to its lowest depths there appear monsters and heroes, prodigies of crime and prodigies of virtue.Collection: Hero
There are places and climates, seasons and hours, with their outward circumstance, so much in harmony with certain impressions of the heart, that Nature and the soul of man appear to be parts of one vast whole.Collection: Heart
Women have much more heart and much more imagination than men; hence, fancy often allures them.Collection: Heart
My mother was convinced, and on this head I have retained her firm belief, that to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state; that it is one of those curses cast upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity.Collection: Mother
If God is thy father, human beings are thy brothers and sisters.Collection: Brother
The founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire, that is Muhammed. As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask, is there any man greater than he?Collection: Spiritual
I am the fellow citizen of every being that thinks; my country is Truth.Collection: Country
The reason that women are so much more sociable than men is because they act more from the heart than the intellect.Collection: Heart
Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.Collection: War
Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages.Collection: Angel
If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad? The most famous men created arms, laws, and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples, dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world; and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls.Collection: Eye
Let us love the passing hour, let us hurry up and enjoy our time.Collection: Hours
True love is the ripe fruit of a lifetime.Collection: Love
God has placed the genius of women in their hearts, because the works of this genius are always works of love.Collection: Heart
All our tastes are but reminiscences.Collection: Taste
Silence and simplicity obtrude on no one, but are yet two unequaled attractions in woman.Collection: Two
Life is too short to spare an hour of it in the indulgence of this evil passion.Collection: Life Is Too Short
Radicalism is but the desperation of logic.Collection: Radicalism
Utopias are often just premature truths.Collection: Utopia
Friendship, sweet-resting place of the soul, the gloaming wherein our hearts find peace.Collection: Friendship
Joy is a flame which association alone can keep alive, and which goes out unless communicated.Collection: Flames
Time is a great ocean which, like the other ocean, overflows with our remains.Collection: Time
Void of freedom, what would virtue be?Collection: Freedom
Good manners require space and time.Collection: Space
Eloquence dwells quite as much in the hearts of the hearers as on the lips of the orator.Collection: Heart
All nature is the temple; earth the altar.Collection: Nature
Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.Collection: Civilization
Religions are not proved, are not demonstrated, are not established, are not overthrown by logic! They are of all the mysteries of nature and the human mind, the most mysterious and most inexplicable; they are of instinct and not of reason.Collection: Mind
Mystery hovers over all things here below.Collection: Mystery
Let us savour the swift delights of the most beautiful of our days!Collection: Beautiful