“The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.”

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

The difference breeds hatred.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.

I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction,” said Mathilde. “It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of an extreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.

Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.

No living thing is ugly in this world. Even a tarantula considers itself beautiful.

Every girl is beautiful if they have the ability to believe in themselves.

The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.

Charm strikes the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Conceit is to nature what paint is to beauty; it is not only needless, but it impairs what it would improve.

The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind – that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. . . . Now I can believe I have at least helped a little.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.