A courage which looks easy & yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons - the least rewarded of all forms of courage.
Though your vulgarian does not readily admit that feelings can change overnight, certainly two lovers often part far more abruptly than they came together.
When she lives at his palace, the maiden niece of a bishop can pass for a respectable woman because, if she has a love affair, she is obliged to hoodwink her uncle.
If certain women walk straight into adultery, there are many others who cling to numerous hopes, and commit sin only after wandering through a maze of sorrows.
Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.
[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.
Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world--the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?
Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.