Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.

Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical?

If you don't build castles in the air you won't build anything on the ground.

He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.

Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.