Dignity and love do not blend.

Fortune does not change [people], it unmasks them.

In looking around me seeking for miserable resources against the heaviness of time, I open a book and I say to myself, as the cat to the fox: I have only one good turn, but I need no other.

Our own cast-off sorrows are not sufficient to constitute sympathy for others.

That woman is happiest whose life is passed in the shadow of a manly, loving heart.

For the honest people, relations increase with the years. For the vicious, inconveniences increase. Inconstancy is the defect of vice; the influence of habit is one of the qualities of virtue.

The revolting details of childbirth had been hidden from me with such care that I was as surprised as I was horrified, and I cannot help thinking that the vows most women are made to take are very foolhardy. I doubt whether they would willingly go to the altar to swear that they will allow themselves to be broken on the wheel every nine months.