We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age before we can rise above it.

I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer.

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.