Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

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.

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.