Barbarism is not at our frontiers, but at our doors. We bear within us
greater things, but we ourselves are how much smaller! Strange paradox:
that their objective civilisation should have created great men as it
were by accident, while our subjective civilisation, contrary to its
express mission, turns out paltry halflings. Things are becoming
majestic, but man is diminishing.


_The Glory of Motherhood_


A mother should be to her child as the sun in the heavens, a changeless
and ever radiant star, whither the inconstant little creature, so ready
with its tears and its daughter, so light, so passionate, so stormy, may
come to calm and to fortify itself with heat and light. A mother
represents goodness, providence, law, nay, divinity itself, under the
only form in which childhood can meet with these high things. If,
therefore, she is passionate, she teaches that God is capricious or
despotic, or even that there are several gods in conflict. The child's
religion depends on the way in which its mother and its father have
lived, and not on the way in which they have spoken. The inmost tone of
their life is precisely what reaches their child, who finds no more than
comedy or empty thunder in their maxims, remonstrances and punishments.
Their actual and central worship--that is what his instinct infallibly
perceives. A child sees what we are, through all the fictions of what we
would be.

It is curious to see, in discussions on speculative matters, how
abstract minds, who move from ideas to facts, always do battle for
concrete reality; while concrete minds, on the other hand, who move from