I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray... I am myself the matter of my book.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

The Goddess helps us heal the deep wound within us that tells us we are unworthy.

Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

Yet my great-grandfather was but a water-man, looking one way and rowing another: and I got most of my estate by the same occupation.

Maybe the absence of signs is a sign.

His life was one long extravaganza, like living inside a Faberge egg.

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.

Nobody notices your sorrow, your pain, but everyone notices your mistakes.

After all, we are not children. It's time we planned our life.

Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.