C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Madame de Girardin
A man who is proud of small things shows that small things are great to him.
A woman whom we truly love is a religion.
A woman’s natural protector is less an aged father or tall brother than a very young child.
Ennui is the rust of the mind born of idleness. It is unused tools that corrode.
Good taste is the modesty of the mind; that is why it cannot be either imitated or acquired.
Grief is the culture of the soul, it is the true fertilizer.
Hope, alas! is our waking dream.
Infidelity, like death, admits of no degrees.
Innocence is ignorance.
Instinct is the nose of the mind.
It has been said that society is for the happy, the rich; we should rather say the happy have no need of it.
It is hard to ask; it is sweet to give.
Love with men is not a sentiment, but an idea.
O, how true it is there can be no tête-à-tête where vanity reigns!
Self-interest, that leprosy of the age, attacks us from infancy, and we are startled to observe little heads calculate before knowing how to reflect.
Servility is to devotion what hypocrisy is to virtue.
Simplicity is doubtless a fine thing, but it often appeals only to the simple. Art is the only passion of true artists. Palestrina’s music resembles the music of Rossini, as the song of the sparrow is like the cavatina of the nightingale. Choose!
The best religion is the most tolerant.
The first duty of a woman is to be pretty.
To love one who loves you, to admire one who admires you,—in a word, to be the idol of one’s idol—is exceeding the limit of human joy; it is stealing fire from heaven, and deserves death.
We are only vulnerable and ridiculous through our pretensions.
Without the ideal, the inexhaustible source of all progress, what would man be?