Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering – a hell of boredom.
Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.
Not seeing people permits us to imagine in them every perfection.
No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.
No one but a woman knows how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.
Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.
Many great actions are committed in small struggles.
Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
Love is like a tree: it shoots of itself; it strikes its roots deeply into our whole being, and frequently continues to be green over a heart in ruins. And there is this unaccountable circumstance attending it, that the blinder the passion the more tenacious it is. Never is it stronger than when it is most unreasonable.
Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.