To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.

Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never.

The photographer will never replace the painter; one is a man, the other a machine. Let us compare them no longer. (1848)

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad? The most famous men created arms, laws, and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples, dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world; and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls.

A woman's strength is most potent when robed in gentleness.

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)