“Man is no match for woman where mischief reigns.”

The more you judge, the less you love.

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

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.

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.

Experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him.

May my heart always be open to little birds, who are the secrets of living. Whatever they sing is better than to know. And if men should not hear them – then men are old.

I want a man I can keep for myself. I wouldn’t ever share my man with anyone else.

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.

What great men do, common men follow.

Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.

Encouragement is awesome. Think about it. It has the capacity to lift a man’s or a woman’s shoulders. To breathe fresh air into the fading embers of a smoldering dream. To actually change the course of another human being’s day, week, or life.

As a black man, I have to respect myself and have nice things. As a man in general.