An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

There is no soul that does not respond to love, for the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back.

Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention.

To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles-is this not to master the future?

Every year, in November, at the season that follows the hour of the dead, the crowning and majestic hours of autumn, I go to visit the chrysanthemums ... They are indeed, the most universal, the most diverse of flowers.

Brave old-flowers! Wall-flowers, Gilly flowers, Stocks! For even as the field-flowers, from which a trifle, a ray of beauty, a drop of perfume, divides them, they have charming names, the softest in the language; and each of them, like tiny, art-less ex-votos, or like medals bestowed by the gratitude of men, proudly bears three or four.