“At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.”

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

I have a bad memory for facts.

Far less envy in America than in France.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse – as a luxury befitting a young man.

The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.

If there is disturbance in the camp, the general’s authority is weak.

One of the great commandments of science is: Mistrust arguments from authority.

Authority is never without hate.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

Health must always come first. It is an exceptional moment and we must follow the indications of both health organizations and public authorities.

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.