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

What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.

Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.

Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing.

It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

Art’s greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.

Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.

If we all said to people’s faces what we say behind one another’s backs, society would be impossible.

The greater a man’s talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

The more you judge, the less you love.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Anything that looks good makes you feel better.

I think you are who you are, and your kids will see who you are. So you’d better be a good person, because they are going to see it, and that’s going to shape them. They are going to become you.

The world can’t tell you who you are. You’ve just got to figure out who you are and be there, for better or worse.

I mean, we’re always trying to evaluate and tweak things and get better.

I am human like everyone else. I am aware that there are people who look up to me. When mistakes are made, they aren’t intentional, and I constantly push myself to be a better person.

To be honest, I think about the clubs when I write. But I should probably start thinking about stadiums, because the songs sound even better there – and bigger.

We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things. That is what we are put on the earth for.

I’m working hard with more determination than ever. My success at the Salon led to my selling several paintings and since your absence I have made 800 francs; I hope, when I have contracts with more dealers, it will be better still.