Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.
In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become like women; their thoughts can revolve around the minor facts of life and penetrate their hidden meaning.
I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me . . . to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.
Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.
Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.
Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.
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.
Self-love is as protective as the Deity; Disenchantment is as perspicacious as a surgeon; Experience is as provident as a mother. Such are the theologic virtues of marriage.