“Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.”

If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.

Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

Sometimes the impact of Mozart’s music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.

The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.

Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.

When you want to court a woman, court her sister first

War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.