almost all novels are love stories.

Years do not always make age.

Sorrow makes us very good or very bad.

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.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, and one's inner happiness.

Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.

living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.