The great artist is the simplifier.

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

Life is short and we never have enough time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us. O, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind.

Learn to limit yourself, to content yourself with some definite thing, and some definite work; dare to be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not, and to believe in your own individuality.

Charm: that quality in others of making us more satisfied with ourselves.

Blessed be childhood, which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness.

To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.