There are incommensurable differences between the man who mingles with others and him who dwells with nature. Once captured, Toussaint Louverture died without uttering a word, while Napoleon, on his rock, chattered like a magpie; he wished to explain himself.
Man has a horror of solitude, and of all solitudes the purely moral is the most terrible. The early anchorites lived with God. They dwelt in the spiritual world, which is the most populous of all. Misers inhabit a world of fantasy and delight; for the miser has everything, even to his sex, in his brain. Man’s first thought, then, be he leper or galley-slave, is to find an accomplice to his destiny. To the satisfaction of this aim, which is life itself, he employs all his strength and all his power. Without this sovereign desire, could Satan have found companions?
Solitude is inhabitable only by the man of genius, who peoples it with ideas, or by the contemplator of the universe, who sees it illuminated by the light of heaven and animated by the voice of God. To others solitude is to torture as the mind is to the body. It is suffering multiplied by the infinite.
The moral of all things has puddles, from which the world’s dishonored, as they drown, throw mud on others.
The study of the mysteries of thought, the discovery of the organs of the soul, the geometry of the forces, the phenomena of its power, the appreciation of the faculty which we seem to possess of moving independently of the body,—in a word, the laws of its dynamics, and those of its physical influence will constitute the coming centuries’ glorious share in science.
We are obliged to accept the ideas of the poet, the picture of the painter, the statue of the sculptor; but we all of us interpret music according to our grief or our happiness, our hopes or our despair. Where other arts circle our thoughts, and fix them on a determined object, music sends them flitting over the expanses of nature which it has the power to depict.
Thought is the key to every treasure. It brings to us a miser’s joy without his cares.
There is not a forest without its significance, not a high-way nor a by-way which does not present analogies with the labyrinth of human thought. What man, whose mind is cultivated or whose heart has suffered, ever walked in a forest that the forest did not speak to him? Insensibly there arises a voice, either consoling or terrible, and often consoling and terrible. If the cause of the grave and mysterious sensation which then seizes him be sought, it will be found, I think, in the sublime spectacle of creatures obeying the destinies to which they are immutably subjected. Sooner or later an overwhelming sentiment of the permanence of nature fills the heart, and the thought turns irresistibly to God.
The more illegal the gain, the greater its attraction. Such is the heart of man.
An out-and-out criminal rarely exists, for there are few among us who do not permit themselves one or two good actions, at least. Be it from curiosity, from pride, for the sake of contrast, or by accident, every man has had his moment of kindliness and benevolence.