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

Heavens! whatever possesses us, here below, that we mutually torment ourselves, sourly reproach our mutual faults, and mercilessly condemn all that is not cut according to our pattern?

The life of great geniuses is nothing but a sublime storm.

It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.

a woman, when she is heroic, is not heroic by halves.

Years do not always make age.

One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.