There is but on virtue--the eternal sacrifice of self.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

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.

Whoever has loved once, knows all that life contains of sorrow and of joy.

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.

Art speaks only to the mind, whereas nature speaks to all the faculties.

Our work can never be better than we are ourselves.