A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

For businessmen, the world is a bale of banknotes in circulation; for most young men, it is a woman; for some women, it is a man; and for others it may be a salon, a coterie, a part of town or a whole city.

Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.

Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!