“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.”

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.

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.

I don’t want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally.

Every new truth has its birth-place in a manger, lives thirty years, is crucified, and then deified.

Let our lives be in accordiance with our convictions of right, each striving to carry out our principles

life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of ‘family.

I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

Seek to learn constantly while you live; do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.

Memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for.