long journeys are strange things: if we were always to continue in the same mind we are in at the end of a journey, we should never stir from the place we were then in: but Providence in kindness to us causes us to forget it. It is much the same with lying-in women. Heaven permits this forgetfulness that the world may be peopled, and that folks may take journeys to Provence.

there are some people who never acknowledge themselves in the wrong; God help them!

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

Death makes us all equal.

It is day by day that we go forward; today we are as we were yesterday and tomorrow we shall be like ourselves today. So we go on without being aware of it, and this is one of the miracles of Providence that I so love.

. . . it seldom happens, I think, that a man has the civility to die when all the world wishes it.

Religious people spend so much time with their confessors because they like to talk about themselves.