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.

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

Age continually alters the faces of those who think or study, and so their portraits differ from one another and don't even resemble them for very long. I dream so much and live so little that I'm sometimes only three years old. But the next day I'm three hundred, if the dream has been sombre.

It is love, not faith, that moves mountains.

Simplicity is the essence of the great, the true, the beautiful in art.

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.

No human creature can give orders to love.