What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.

Every time you wink the stars move.

How much finer things are in composition than alone.

Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.