The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals as well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves.

If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.

Every situation is an equilibrium of forces; every life is a struggle between opposing forces working within the limits of a certain equilibrium

I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.

Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.

Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.