“Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.”

“About Anna Faktorovich's "Romances of George Sand": “What a read! Not lacking in action and very imaginative.”

“I'm beginning to believe that there are angels disguised as men who pass themselves off as such and who inhabit the earth for a while to console and lift up with them toward heaven the poor, exhausted and saddened souls who were ready to perish here below.”

“And so, what of it all? What of me and my passions and personas, my great loves and failures of love, my writing, my politics? What of the clanging opinions, the endless queries as to the whys and wherefores of how I chose to conduct myself? In the end, there is but one answer to every question, whether it is spit at me or made as gentlest inquiry: I was I.”

“He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.”

“The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.”

“The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.”

“Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.”

“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius. ”

“Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.”

“Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.”