Admiration and familiarity are strangers |
Admiration and familiarity are strangers |
Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it. |
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. |
Every historian discloses a new horizon |
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. |
Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness. |
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. |
I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy |
I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity. |
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. |
If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity. |
It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil. |
Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness. |
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. |