Sophie Swetchine Quotes

The ideal friendship is to feel as one while remaining two.

Years do not make sages; they only make old men.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.

I like people to be saints; but I want them to be first and superlatively honest men.

Since there must be chimeras, why is not perfection the chimera of all men?

Let us shun everything, which might tend to efface the primitive lineaments of our individuality. Let us reflect that each one of us is a thought of God.

The symptoms of compassion and benevolence, in some people, are like those minute guns which warn you that you are in deadly peril.

Youth should be a savings bank.

Those who have suffered much are like those who know many languages; they have learned to understand and be understood by all.

There are not good things enough in life to indemnify us for the neglect of a single duty.

I study much, and the more I study, the oftener I go back to those first principles which are so simple that childhood itself can lisp them.

Attention is a silent and perpetual flattery.

Antiquity is a species of aristocracy with which it is not easy to be on visiting terms.

When any one tells you that he belongs to no party, you may at any rate be sure that he does not belong to yours.

When fresh sorrows have caused us to take some steps in the right way, we may not complain. We have invested in a life annuity, but the income remains.

We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more.

We must labor unceasingly to render our piety reasonable, and our reason pious.

If it were ever allowable to forget what is due to superiority of rank, it would be when the privileged themselves remember it.

There is, by God's grace, an immeasurable distance between late and too late.

The most culpable of the excesses of Liberty is the harm she does herself.

The beings who appear cold, but are only timid, adore where they dare to love.

To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others.

By becoming unhappy, we sometimes learn how to be less so.

Strength alone knows conflict, weakness is born vanquished.

The best advice on the art of being happy is about as easy to follow as advice to be well when one is sick.

Repentance is accepted remorse.

To reveal imprudently the spot where we are most sensitive and vulnerable is to invite a blow. The demigod Achilles admitted no one to his confidence.

The most dangerous of all flattery is the inferiority of those about us.

In retirement, the passage of time seems accelerated. Nothing warns us of its flight. It is a wave which never murmurs, because there is no obstacle to its flow.

We are amused through the intellect, but it is the heart that saves us from ennui.

If grief is to be mitigated, it must either wear itself out or be shared.

We are rich only through what we give.