Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

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

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.

Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.

[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.