Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sevigne Quotes

Religious people spend so much time with their confessors because they like to talk about themselves.

I love you so passionately, that I hide a great part of my love, so as not to oppress you with it.

Nothing is more certain of destroying any good feeling that may be cherished towards us than to show distrust. To be suspected as an enemy is often enough to make a man become so; the whole matter is over, there is no farther use of guarding against it. On the contrary, confidence leads us naturally to act kindly, we are affected by the good opinion which others entertain of us, and we are not easily induced to lose it.

There are twelve hours in the day, and above fifty in the night.

I pity those who have no taste for reading.

If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?

We are never satisfied with having done well; and in endeavoring to do better, we do much worse.

When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.

I dislike clocks with second-hands; they cut up life into too small pieces.

there are some people who never acknowledge themselves in the wrong; God help them!

good and evil travel on the same road, but they leave different impressions.

Why do we discover faults so much more readily than perfection.

The human heart will never wrinkle

The desire to be singular and to astonish by ways out of the common seems to me to be the source of many virtues.

. . . it seldom happens, I think, that a man has the civility to die when all the world wishes it.

I fear nothing so much as a man who is witty all day long.

I know of no sorrow greater than that occasioned by a delay of the post.

There is nobody who is not dangerous for someone.

We must always live in hope; without that consolation there would be no living.

If we could have a little patience, we should escape much mortification; time takes away as much as it gives.

True friendship is never serene.

It is a disgraceful thing to be ignorant.

There is no real evil in life, except great pain; all the rest is imaginary, and depends on the light in which we view things

Not to find pleasure in serious reading gives a pastel coloring to the mind.

long journeys are strange things: if we were always to continue in the same mind we are in at the end of a journey, we should never stir from the place we were then in: but Providence in kindness to us causes us to forget it. It is much the same with lying-in women. Heaven permits this forgetfulness that the world may be peopled, and that folks may take journeys to Provence.