We think that play and fairytales belong to childhood - how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time in our life to live without play and fairytales! We give these things other names, to be sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence that they are the same things, for the child too regards play as his work and fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic division of life into different stages - as though each brought something new.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles.

The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.

Love is more afraid of change than destruction.

The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.

Let man fear woman when she loves: then she makes any sacrifice, and everything else seems without value to her