All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.

With monuments as with men, position means everything.

The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.

Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.