What have you to do with hearts, except for dissection?

The Lord gave, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.′ We repeated the holy sentences of resignation; but it was not resignation, it was despair that subdued the violence of our grief.

They were dreamers – and they dreamt themselves into the cemetery.

A modern writer likens coquettes to those hunters who do not eat the game which they have successfully pursued.

Guilt soon learns to lie.

There was sufficient left, however, of the liveliness of a long time ago to give an air of ghastly mirth to the old woman’s manner, which made that manner extremely repulsive. What can be more repulsive than old age, which, shorn of the beauties and graces, is yet not purified from the follies or the vices of departed youth?

Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial intellect.

We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life – this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures on a shattered dial.

Our virtues, as well as our vices, are often scourges for our own backs.

Life is such a very troublesome matter, when all is said and done, that it’s as well even to take its blessings quietly.