What is art? Nature concentrated.
I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.
It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance.
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
For the person who loves God, worship is the daily bread of patience.
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man.
Passion is born deaf and dumb.
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.