The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before.
There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile.
The tragic drama has the great moral drawback of attaching too high an importance to life and death.
Speron-Speroni admirably explains how it is that an author who, in his own opinion, delivers himself clearly, is sometimes obscure to his reader. “It is because,” he says, “the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, the reader from the expression to the thought.”