One wastes so much time, one is so prodigal of life, at twenty! Our days of winter count for double. That is the compensation of the old.

The masses are still ungrateful or ignorant. They prefer murder, poisonings, and crimes generally to a literature possessed of style and feeling.

Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith.

To forgive a fault in another is more sublime than to be faultless one's self.

The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.

The most honest of men is the one who thinks and acts best, but the most powerful is the one who writes and speaks best.

The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.