Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.

To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.

Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave

The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.