“Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.”

In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.

Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.

To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy–a vice which yields no return?

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.

As a rule, only the poor are generous.

It is the wind and the rain, O God, the cold and the storm that make this earth of yours to blossom and bear its fruit. So in our lives it is storm and stress and hurt and suffering that make real men and women bring the world’s work to its highest perfection.

Adversity makes men remember God.

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.

Men are seldom blessed with good fortune and good sense at the same time.

I’m just what America needs: another unemployed black man.

God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.

Don’t cook. Don’t clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum.

He is truly a man who will not permit himself to be unduly elated when fortune’s breeze is favorable, or cast down when it is adverse.