The Man Who Laughs

To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within.

the paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor."

Under James II. a young millionaire lord who had during the night set fire to a thatched cottage—a feat which made all London burst with laughter—was proclaimed the King of Fun. The poor devils in the cottage were saved in their night clothes. The members of the Fun Club, all of the highest aristocracy, used to run about London during the hours when the citizens were asleep, pulling the hinges from the shutters, cutting off the pipes of pumps, filling up cisterns, digging up cultivated plots of ground, putting out lamps, sawing through the beams which supported houses, breaking the window panes, especially in the poor quarters of the town. It was the rich who acted thus towards the poor. For this reason no complaint was possible. That was the best of the joke. Those manners have not altogether disappeared. In many places in England and in English possessions—at Guernsey, for instance—your house is now and then somewhat damaged during the night, or a fence is broken, or the knocker twisted off your door. If it were poor people who did these things, they would be sent to jail; but they are done by pleasant young gentlemen.

As in heaven, so on earth—no light. Not a lamp below, not a star above.

When infinity opens to us, terrible indeed is the closing of the gate behind.

The law for the protection of children had at first this strange result: it caused many children to be abandoned.

Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no complaint—the irreproachable does not reproach.

The sea becomes Ocean: its power reveals itself as Will: that which one takes for a thing is a soul. It will become visible; hence the terror. The soul of man fears to be thus confronted with the soul of nature.

We know what his displeasure was when Madame Henriette forgot herself so far as to see a hen in a dream—which was, indeed, a grave breach of good manners in a lady of the court.

It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictions never perplex us.