Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

The poet is always our contemporary.

As a woman, I have no country

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

Would there be trees if we didn't see them?

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.