Plenty of things in life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select from realities those which contain the possibility of poetry.

What place indeed is there in the shallow petty frivolous thing called society for noble thoughts and feelings?

Only just now she said to me, ‘I am very happy, papa!' When they say ‘father' stiffly, it sends a chill through me; but when they call me ‘papa,' it brings all the old memories back. I feel most their father then; I even believe that they belong to me, and to no one else.

Happiness is the inner poetry of women, just as fine clothes are the mask of beauty.

You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

At each sentence my hostess put her head forward, looking at me with an innkeeper's keen scrutiny, a happy compromise between the instinct of a police constable, the astuteness of a spy, and the cunning of a dealer.