Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

• Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
• One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
• If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
• Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
• The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
• What is art? Nature concentrated.
• All humanity is passion without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
• At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist there can only be promise of the coming woman.
• Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
• Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.