Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.

One changes from day to day, and… after a few years have passed one has completely altered.

Work is not man’s punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.

No human creature can give orders to love.

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.

Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.

There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.

No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.

I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord, for they were born kings of the earth far more truly than those who possess it only from having bought it.

The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.

One approaches the journey’s end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.

I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.

Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?

Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.