Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.
Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.
A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one.
Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.
Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.
If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.
One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?
I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.
Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?
...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.
But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.
Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.
When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.
At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.
Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.
Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.
Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. ... there are no age limits for love.
The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.
It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.
In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.
I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
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.
I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
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.
The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.
War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.
I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.
The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.
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.