Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.

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

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

Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.

Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.