There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.

The disinterest [of my two great-aunts] in anything that had to do with high society was such that their sense of hearing ... put to rest its receptor organs and allowed them to suffer the true beginnings of atrophy.