Four varieties in society: lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.

We study ourselves three weeks, we love each other three months, we squabble three years, we tolerate each other thirty years, and then the children start all over again.

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

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.

To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.

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

There are as many kinds of modesty as there are races. To the English woman it is a duty; to the French woman a propriety.