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

The capacity for passion is both cruel and divine.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

One never knows how much a family may grow; and when a hive is too full, and it is necessary to form a new swarm, each one thinks of carrying away his own honey.

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

Writing a journal means that facing your ocean you are afraid to swim across it, so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.