Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.

She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.