good and evil travel on the same road, but they leave different impressions.

[After being corrected by a grammarian for using the feminine pronoun instead of the pseudogeneric masculine:] As you please, but for my part, if I were to express myself so, I should fancy I had a beard.

Not to find pleasure in serious reading gives a pastel coloring to the mind.

The desire to be singular and to astonish by ways out of the common seems to me to be the source of many virtues.

Nothing is so capable of overturning a good intention as to show a distrust of it; to be suspected for an enemy, is often sufficient to make a person become one.

Faith creates the virtues in which it believes.

the days, and the months, and the years, pass so swiftly, that I can no longer retain them. Time, in its flight, hurries me away, in spite of myself; in vain I endeavor to stop him, he drags me along: the thought of this alarms me.