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Joy may sometimes produce strange effects and be as oppressive as sorrow.’
the heart of a woman is such that, however arid it may become when the winds of prejudice and the demands of etiquette have blown across it, there always remains one corner that is radiant and fertile – the one that God has dedicated to maternal love.
‘Cedant arma togae,’
"let arms yield to the toga (civil authority )"
in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don’t kill a man, you remove an obstacle,
to a happy man, a prayer is a monotonous composition, void of meaning, until the day when suffering deciphers the sublime language through which the poor victim addresses God.
Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge. My captivity concentrated all my faculties on a single point. They had previously been dispersed, now they clashed in a narrow space; and, as you know, the clash of clouds produces electricity, electricity produces lightning and lightning gives light.’
Every individual, from the lowest to the highest on the social scale, is at the centre of a little network of interests, with its storms and its hooked atoms, like the worlds of Descartes;2 except that these worlds get larger as one goes up: it is a reverse spiral balanced on a single point.
‘Is the world full of tigers and crocodiles, then?’ ‘Yes, except that the tigers and crocodiles with two legs are more dangerous than the rest.’
‘Alas, my child,’ he said, ‘human knowledge is very limited and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history and the three or four modern languages that I speak, you will know everything that I know; and it will take me scarcely two years to transfer all this knowledge from my mind to yours.’
that evening the two prisoners drew up an educational syllabus which they began to carry out the following day.
