James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Lamartine
A conscience without God is a tribunal without a judge.
Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can, and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.
Habit, with its iron sinews, clasps and leads us day by day.
It is for truth that God created genius.
Kindness is virtue itself.
La goutte de rosée à l’herbe suspendue, / y réfléchit un ciel aussi vaste, aussi pur, / Que l’immense océan dans ses plaines d’azur—The drop of dew which hangs suspended from the grass-blade reflects a heaven as vast and pure as the ocean does in its wide azure plains.
La passion déprave, mais elle élève aussi—Passion depraves, but it also elevates.
Le cœur de l’homme n’est jamais si inflexible que son esprit—The heart of man is never so inflexible as his intellect.
Le peuple est le cœur du pays—The people is the heart of a country.
Le peuple ne comprend que ce qu’il sent. Les seuls orateurs pour lui sont ceux qui l’émeuvent—The people understand only what they feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them.
Le réel est étroit, le possible est immense—The real is limited, the possible is unlimited.
Les médiocrités croient égaler le génie en dépassant la raison—Men of moderate abilities think to rank as geniuses by outstripping reason.
Les passions personelles se lassent et s’usent; les passions publiques jamais—Private passions tire and exhaust themselves; public ones never.
Les utopies ne sont souvent que des vérités prématuriées—Utopias are often only premature truths.
Man is a fallen god, who remembers heaven, his former dwelling-place.
Passion depraves, but also ennobles.
Poetry is the morning dream of great minds.
Poets and heroes are of the same race; the latter do what the former conceive.
Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.
Religions are not proved, are not established, are not overthrown, by logic. They are, of all the mysteries of nature and the human mind, the most mysterious and inexplicable; they are of instinct, and not of reason.
The persistent aspirations of the human race are to society what the compass is to the ship. It sees not the shore, but it guides to it.
Two qualities are demanded of a statesman who would direct any great movement of opinion in which he himself takes a part; he must have a complete understanding of the movement itself, and he must be animated by the same motives as those which inspire the movement.