Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Modesty is the conscience of the body.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.