She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

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.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.

It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.

Spira, spera. (breathe, hope)