I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

Many old people receive pensions for no other reason, it seems to me, but as a compensation for having lived a long time ago.

Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. Man would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him. He needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth.

I never was so rapid in my virtue but my vice kept up with me.

While my friend was my friend, he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him. When he became my enemy, he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow.