When grace combines with wrinkles, it is admirable. There is an indescribable light of dawn about intensely happy old age. . . . The young person is handsome, but the old, superb.

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

Popularity? It's glory's small change.

I had a dream my life would be different from this hell I am living, so different from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.

As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.

Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.