A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.

[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.

In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.

What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.

To man, faith; to woman, doubt. She bears the heavier burden. Does not woman invariably suffer for two?

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.