Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.