Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used.

If I am the devil's child, I will live then, by the devil.

A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspend their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.

Life is a series of surprises.

Every man's task [his 'great dream' and impassioned life-goal] is his life preserver.

One of our statesmen said, "The curse of this country is eloquent men."

Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.