You can read part one here. The post was just getting excessively long, and I figured that two post would make things more accessible. You seriously need to read all of these. Words have power, my friends.
Pg. 934-935: "What a great thing, to be loved! What a greater thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything but what is elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more spring up in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene soul, inaccessible to common passions and common emotions, rising above the clouds and shadows of this world, its follies, its falsehoods, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of the skies, and no longer feels anything but the deep subterranean commotions of destiny, as the summit of the mountains feels the quaking of the earth.
"If no one loved, the sun would go out."
Pg. 986: "When you know and when you love you will still suffer. The day dawns in tears. The luminous weep, but only over the dark ones."
Pg. 999: "Knowledge is a viaticum, thought is of primary necessity, not only grain but truth is nourishment. Through fasting from knowledge and wisdom, reason becomes emaciated. As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat. If there is anything more poignant than a body agonizing for want of bread, it is a soul dying of hunger for light."
Pg. 1000: "We who believe, what can we fear?
"There is no backward flow of ideas any more than of rivers.
"But those who do not want the future should think it over. In saying no to progress, it is not the future that they condemn, but themselves. They are giving themselves a melancholy disease; they are inoculating themselves with the past. There is only one way of refusing tomorrow, and that is to die.
"No, no death -- that of the body as late as possible, never that of the soul -- is what we desire."
Pg. 1001: "We do not know the diseases of the ancient civilizations, we know the infirmities of our own."
Pg. 1004: "Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most night."
Pg. 1026: "There is an expansion of thought peculiar to the proximity of the grave; being near death makes us see the truth."
Pg. 1128: "There is nobody who has not noticed it in himself, the soul -- and this is the marvel of its complicated unity and ubiquity -- has the wonderful faculty of reasoning almost coolly in the most desperate extremities; and it often happens that disconsolate passion and deep despair, in the very agony of their darkest soliloquies, weigh subjects and discuss theses. Logic mingles with convulsion, and the thread of syllogism floats unbroken in the dreary storm of thought."
Pg. 1148: "What are the convulsions of a city compared to the emeutes of the soul? Man is a depth still more profound than the people."
Pg. 1155: "Great griefs contain dejection. They discourage existence."
Pg. 1190-1191: "Equality, citizens, is not all vegetation of one level, a society of big blades of grass and little oaks; a neighborhood of jealousies emasculating each other; civilly, it is all aptitudes having equal opportunity; politically, all votes having equal weight; religiously, all consciences having equal rights. Equality has an organ: free and compulsory education. The right to the alphabet, we must being by that. The primary school obligatory for everyone, the highest school offered to everyone, such is the law. From identical schools spring an equal society. Yes, education! Light! Light!
Pg. 1279: "The pupil dilates in the night, and at last finds day in it, even as the soul dilates in misfortune, and at last finds God in it."
Pg. 1320: "Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and that terrified him -- he who had never in his life known anything but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory. One of these two straight lines excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one?"
Pg. 1394: "We have all had these moments of trouble, in which everything within us is dispersed; we say the fist things that come to mind, which are not always precisely those that we should say. There are sudden revelations we cannot bear, that intoxicate like a noxious wine."
Pg. 1396: "It is not enough to be happy, we must be satisfied with ourselves."
Pg. 1397: "Your heart is not as quickly lacerated when you are at peace with yourself."
Pg. 1398: "To live, I once stole a loaf of bread; today, to live, I will not steal a name."
Pg. 1458: "It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live."
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