If we would succeed in works of the imagination, we must offer a mild morality in the midst of rigid manners; but where the manners are corrupt, we must consistently hold up to view an austere morality.
Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.
Providence protects us in all the details of our lot.
It seems to me that we become more dear one to the other, in together admiring works of art, which speak to the soul by their true grandeur.
Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society.
Intellect does not attain its full force unless it attacks power.
Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.
A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.
Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.
That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.
Men do not change, they unmask themselves.
The greater part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to man.
Only the refined and delicate pleasures that spring from research and education can build up barriers between different ranks.
The egotism of woman is always for two.
Gaiety pleases more when we are assured that it does not cover carelessness.
Genius inspires this thirst for fame: there is no blessing undesired by those to whom Heaven gave the means of winning it.
Glory can be for a woman but the brilliant morning of happiness.
When women oppose themselves to the projects and ambition of men, they excite their lively resentment; if in their youth they meddle with political intrigues, their modesty must suffer.
Tombs decked by the arts can scarcely represent death as a formidable enemy; we do not, indeed, like the ancients, carve sports and dances in the sarcophagus, but thought is diverted from the bier by works that tell of immortality, even from the altar of death.
New doctrines ever displease the old. They like to fancy that the world has been losing wisdom, instead of gaining it, since they were young.