Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.
Oh be swift to live, make haste to be kind.
Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so.
Analysis kills spontaneity.
Hope is only the love of life.
He who is silent is forgotten; he who does not advance falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed, out distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow becomes smaller; he who leaves off, gives up; the condition of standing still is the beginning of the end.
Accept life, and you must accept regret.
To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.
Life is an apprenticeship to the constant renunciations, to the steady failure of our claims, our hopes, our powers, our liberty.
Learn to limit yourself; to content yourself with some definite work; dare to be what you are and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not; and to believe in your own individuality.
Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.
Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.
Happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health.
To feel keenly the poetry of a morning’s roses, one has to have just escaped from the claws of this vulture which we call sickness.
There is only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing them good.
Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.
True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.
Society rests upon conscience, not upon science.
We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities.
In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past – a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.