Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.
The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can’t understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.
It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.
You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.
Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women’s clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!
In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.
The faculty of doubting is rare among men. A few choice spirits carry the germs of it in them, but these do not develop without training.
The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
What we call strategy is mainly just crossing rivers on bridges and passing mountains though cols.
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them.
A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so.
To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.
Unhappiness does make people look stupid.