A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.

Earnestness is the salt of eloquence.

...there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables

If nobody loved, the sun would go out.

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.

This conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society. To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise.

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.