“Man may well have covered over and, so to speak, encrusted the truth with the er…” — Joseph de Maistre

We recognize in a plant some unknown power, a single, form-giving force, which creates and conserves, which moves unwaveringly toward its end, which appropriates what is useful to it and rejects that which would harm it.

All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.

There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.

Man, in spite of his fatal degradation, bears always the evident marks of his divine origin, in that every universal belief is always more or less true.