Marriage has, for its share, usefulness, justice, honour, and constancy; a stale but more durable pleasure. Love is grounded on pleasure alone, and it is indeed more gratifying to the senses, keener and more acute; a pleasure stirred and kept alive by difficulties. There must be a sting and a smart in it. It ceases to be love if it has no shafts and no fire.

There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.

As for our pupils talk, let his virtue and his sense of right and wrong shine through it and have no guide but reason. Make him understand that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues; stubbornness and rancour are vulgar qualities, visible in common souls whereas to think again, to change one's mind and to give up a bad case on the heat of the argument are rare qualities showing strength and wisdom.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.

When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never.

If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature.

I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's.