It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.
It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us; in joy we face the storm and defy it.
With renunciation life begins.
But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?
Kindness is always fashionable, and always welcome.
The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much.
All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.
It is little men know of women; their smiles and their tears alike are seldom what they seem.
Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep, and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt, is already accomplished.
When men make themselves into brutes it is just to treat them like brutes.
The inevitable has always found me ready and hopeful.
But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.
Human relations are built on feeling, not on reason or knowledge. And feeling is not an exact science; like all spiritual qualities, it has the vagueness of greatness about it.
The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them.
Old age is the verdict of life.
Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.
There is no corner too quiet, or too far away, for a woman to make sorrow in it.
What we buy, and pay for, is part of ourselves.
That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life.
This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them. In some form or other, we pay for her favors; or we go empty away.
