Young love needs dangers and barriers to nourish it.

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

No human being can control love, and no one is to blame either for feeling it or for losing it. What alone degrades a woman is falsehood.

Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.

Sex is the most respectable and holy thing in all creation, the most serious act in life.

It seems to me that the earth belongs to God who made it and entrusted it to men as a perpetual home. But it cannot have been part of His plan that some men should be ill with overfeeding and that others should die of starvation. No matter what anyone can say they cannot prevent me from feeling sad and angry when I see a beggar crying at a rich man's door.

Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.