“The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.”

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.

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

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.