It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.
Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.
Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.
To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.
The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study.
In a world of hunchbacks, a fine figure becomes a monstrosity.
Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.
Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers.
Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.
The winter’s frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.
Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts.
Art’s greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.
Tradesmen regard an author with a mixed feeling of terror, compassion and curiosity.
It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.
The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.
Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual. Misfortune is a stepping stone for a genius, a piscina for a Christian, a treasure for a man of parts, and an abyss for a weakling.
What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.
When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.