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.

In any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")

You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.

We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.

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