He who has lived a day has lived an age.

Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.

The same common sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.

Eloquence may be found in conversations and in all kinds of writings; it is rarely found when looked for, and sometimes discovered where it is least expected.

False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

The mind, like all other things, will become impaired, the sciences are its food,--they nourish, but at the same time they consume it.

We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together.