If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.

Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

A tree's wood is also its memoir.

People love the ocean. People are always asking me why I don't study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it's because the ocean is a lonely, empty place.

The world is a fickle place, and it's not fair. But if you're getting most of your rewards from you, then you can use that as a kind of compass, and you can be secure in the fact that you're working for the right reason, and you're going in the right direction.

Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.

You can pick wild strawberries with your eyes closed, locating them by smell, for they are two parts perfume to one part taste. An hour of searching might yield a handful if you're lucky. Wild strawberries can't be encouraged, nor can they be discouraged: They come to you unbidden and unearned. They appear, or do not, by the grace of the sun.

A seed knows how to wait... A seed is alive while it waits.

A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.