Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.
Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.
Lying, like license, has its degrees.
Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation, which is one of the most passionate forms of love.
Work is not man’s punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.
Know how to replace in your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the happiness that may be wanting to yourself.
Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.
I’m not full of virtues and noble qualities. I love, but I love strongly, exclusive, stedfasty.
We must love stupid people better than ourselves; are they not the really unfortunate ones of this world? Do not people without taste and without ideal grow constantly weary, rejoicing in nothing, and being quite useless here below?
Unrequited love is as different from the mutual love as the error from the truth.
The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.
Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.
Whoever has loved knows all that life contains of sorrow and joy.
The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world.
I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that he was indifferent.
When they are among us cats are angels.
Not to love is to cease to live.
Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect.