“Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.”

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.

Everybody all over the world takes a wife’s estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.

Friendships are discovered rather than made.

Sometimes, all it takes to connect with someone is a little bit of the same hurt.

Find someone who can hear you even when you’re silent.

Happiness is being at peace, being with loved ones, being comfortable but most of all, it’s having those loved ones.

Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can’t have too many friends because then you’re just not really friends.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

Katya is literally my flesh and blood. Best friend status.

A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept.