What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?
White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.
Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.
We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God’s; the outer side belongs to men.
The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
A woman questions the man who loves exactly as a judge questions a criminal. This being so, a flash of the eye, a mere word, an inflection of the voice or a moment’s hesitation suffice to expose the fact, betrayal or crime he is attempting to conceal.
There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.
Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing.
Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l’habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit.
All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.
Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.
Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues.
There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.