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

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

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

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

No human creature can give orders to love.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.