Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.

Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.

People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.

You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.

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.