that sunlight of the dead which is called literature.

One should make one's life a mosaic. Let the general design be good, the colors lively, and the materials diversified.

The birth of love is always accompanied by the idea of solitude. A single being appears, and the rest of the world grows empty.

marriage was a calamity, but it was not an occupation.

... love always betrays its intentions.

The arts are good and providential in that they allow the soul to imitate the movements of love, and to feel love without its being returned - which, perhaps, is the only way of feeling it permanently.

history ... a sort of immortality turned upside down. Her life stretched backwards through ten centuries.