It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat.

Sometimes he will sit on the carpet in front of you, looking at you with eyes so melting, so caressing and so human, that they almost frighten you, for it is impossible to believe that a soul is not there.

The cat makes himself the companion of your hours of solitude, melancholy and toil.

Good heavens! what a foolish thing is this pretended perfectibility of the human race which is continually being dinned into our ears!

Books follow morals, and not morals books.

Those horses must have been Spanish jennets, born of mares mated with a zephyr; for they went as swiftly as the wind, and the moon, which had risen at our departure to give us light, rolled through the sky like a wheel detached from its carriage.

Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution.