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Every political party has its grotesques and its villains. Antoine Macquart, consumed with envy and hatred, and dreaming of getting his revenge on society, welcomed the Republic as an era of happiness that would allow him to fill his pockets from his neighbour's cashbox, and even strangle his neighbour if he objected in any way.

Our time is the time of optimists. Pessimists go to the Good Mood Salon, void the gall from their subconscious, and become optimists.

Nossir, I've never robbed anybody in my life that couldn't afford to lose it ... You couldn't hire me to rob a filling station or hamburger joint.

[Porthos] sank quite down, breathing his last sigh. With him sank the rock, which even in his agony he still held up. The three men dropped the levers, which rolled upon the tumulary stone. Then, breathless, pale, his brow covered with sweat, Aramis listened, his breast oppressed, his heart ready to break.

Athos to Raoul de Bragelonne: Remember that war with the Arabs is a war of snares, ambuscades, and assassinations.

Oh fame! ... He who had swept into his coffers the inheritance of Nicholas Fouquet, who had robbed him of Lenotre and Lebrun, and had sent him to rot for the remainder of his life in one of the State prisons, -- remembered only the peaches of that vanquished, crushed, forgotten enemy!

Athos possessed all the virtues in their highest excellence. If necessity had required it, he would have been the finest orator in the world; but swhen there was need of silence he swould die rather than utter a syllable.

D'Artagnan: I advise you to take a few hours' rest; go and lie down, sleep for a dozen hours, and when you wake up, go and ride one of my horses until you have tired him to death.

D'Artagnan: I advise you to take a few hours' rest; go and lie down, sleep for a dozen hours, and when you wake up, go and ride one of my horses until you have tired him to death.

D'Artagnan: I advise you to take a few hours' rest; go and lie down, sleep for a dozen hours, and when you wake up, go and ride one of my horses until you have tired him to death.

D'Artagnan: I advise you to take a few hours' rest; go and lie down, sleep for a dozen hours, and when you wake up, go and ride one of my horses until you have tired him to death.

D'Artagnan: I advise you to take a few hours' rest; go and lie down, sleep for a dozen hours, and when you wake up, go and ride one of my horses until you have tired him to death.

D'Artagnan: I advise you to take a few hours' rest; go and lie down, sleep for a dozen hours, and when you wake up, go and ride one of my horses until you have tired him to death.

D'Artagnan: I advise you to take a few hours' rest; go and lie down, sleep for a dozen hours, and when you wake up, go and ride one of my horses until you have tired him to death.

"Our interests, Madame the Duchess, are no longer the same they used to be," said Aramis, smiling without reserve in the dim light, which could not show that his smile was less agreeable and less bright than formerly.

In the closed, isolated town of Plassans, where class divisions were so clearly marked in 1848, the impact of distant political events was very slight. Even today the voice of the people is hardly heard there; the bourgeoisie shows its usual prudence, the nobility its silent despair, and the clergy its shrewd cunning.

I remembered an unpleasant weekend spent struggling to comprehend the philosopher Immanuel Kant's explanation of the difference between calling something beautiful and calling it sublime.... In Kant's epistemology, it meant something limitless, an aesthetically pleasing entity so huge that it made the perceiver's head hurt. Machu Picchu isn't just beautiful, it's sublime.

Have you ever seen Mr. Travel Guy? He's the fellow who strides through international airports dressed like he's flying off to hunt wildebeests -- shirt with dozens of pockets, drip-dry pants that zip off into shorts, floppy hat pulled tight under the chin in case a twister blows through the baggage claim area.

[T]he nobility and the lower classes share the Cours Sauvaire between them. For more than a century, the nobility have chosen to walk on the south side, which is lined with large hôtels and is the first to escape the heat of the sun; the lower classes have to content themselves with the walk on the north side, where the cafes, inns, and tobacconists' shops are located.

There wasn't a tree ... but was all cut to pieces with balls, and the dead and the dying was lying thick. It was an awful sight.

But a distinctive mode of combat was emerging. The grinding, relentless waves of attacks that had rocked the Orange Plank Road hour after hour had no precedent, unless it lay in the same single-minded determination that had starved Vicksburg into submission. Grand would keep trying until he got it right.

A butchery pure and simple it was unrelieved by any of the arts of war in which the exercise of military skill and tact robsz the hour of some of its horrors. It was a mere slugging match in a dense thicket of small growth, where men but a few yards apart fired through the brushwood for hours, ceasing only when exhaustion and night commanded a rest.

This work, which will consist of several episodes, is therefore, as I see it, the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire.

After each era of disturbances, Russia begins living again according to her inner law like the plants which spring back after a storm.

There were three fast pops and he waited until thirty seconds had gone by before looking out the window but he could see nothing. If this were the States it might be kids killing lizards but here kids didn't have guns and those who employed them diplomatically by shooting diplomats.

With single command had come a single plan. The war was no longer a succession of great feats of arms performed to the applause of soldiers, governments and the outside world. It was now a grim business of applying all the pressure possible and waiting for something to break.

The fight was lost. The dragons were coming with invincible strides. The army, helpless in the matted thickets and blinded by the overhanging night, was going to be swallowed. War, the red animal, war, the blood-swollen god, would have bloated fill.

The greater part of the untested men appeared quiet and absorbed. They were going to look at war, the red animal -- war, the blood-swollen god.

But in square stalked plants, the leaves stand respectively unto each other, either in crosse or decussation to those above or below them, arising at crosse positions; whereby they shadow not each other, and better resist the force of winds, which in a parallel situation, and upon square stalkes would more forcibly bear upon them