In the stormy current of life characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain us on the surface.

Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and every day discourse: it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself for the sake of others: it constrains genuine nature, which is selfish and gross.

I wish to reproduce things as they are or as they would be even if I myself did not exist.

There are four types of men in the world: lovers, opportunists, lookers-on, and imbeciles. The happiest are the imbeciles.

The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

His tongue is by turns a sponge, a brush, a comb. He cleans himself, he smooths himself, he knows what is proper.