Life is being, not having.
Gold is so heavy it settles down upon the lowest souls.
Those who deserve love the least need it the most.
The fact that you have been knocked down is interesting, but the length of time you remained down is important.
The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.
The bigger the dam of patience, the worse the flood when the dam breaks.
The only thing in the world we really possess is our knowledge of the truth.
Human truth is always soiled with falsehood.
Art is one of man's few serious activities.
You cannot build up a character in a solitude; you need a formed character to stand a solitude.
Truth lives in the cellar, error on the doorstep.
The only real change in life comes with the consciousness of old age.
Friends made fast seldom remain fast.
A woman, like a cross-eyed man, looks one way, but goes another--hence her mysteriousness.
A politician is like quicksilver: if you try to put your finger on him, you find nothing under it.
A sin is nothing but a deordination of reason, but that is enough.
A small poet repeats himself like a clock.
The modern king has become a vermiform appendix: useless when quiet; when obtrusive, in danger of removal.
When you are dealing with a child, keep all your wits about you, and sit on the floor.
Suspicion is an owl that flies when the light is bad and catches only vermin for food.
Happiness and unhappiness differ as a bucket hammered from gold differs from one pressed in tin ... Each carries the same water.
The perjurer's mother told white lies.
The ideal historian goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: "Lazarus, come forth!" and sets him that was dead for ages, blinking and passionate, in the sun.
If you cultivate piety as an end and not a means, you will become a hypocrite.
Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.
