Within six months, if I am not dead, I shall have seen you again, madam--even if I have to overturn the world.

For in those tacit understandings which maintain the bond of family union, the mother is really the mistress of her daughter only upon the condition of continually presenting herself to her as a model of wisdom and type of perfection.

Misfortune does not help us to believe.

Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.

A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.

Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.