Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

If you can't distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn't undertake philanthropic work.

Try to reason about love, and you will lose your reason.

A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.

There isn't a Monday that would not cede its place to Tuesday.