I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.

The first virtue of all really great men is that they are sincere. They eradicate hypocrisy from their hearts.

Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

The power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man.

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.