"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

"For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium."

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."

"Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery."

"A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else."

"The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy."

"Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance."