A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.
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Jean Jacques Rousseau ... is nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and a...
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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.
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Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
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The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and ...
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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.
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Why not make an end of it all?... My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings.... What is death?... A very small matter, when all is...
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Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ig...
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At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.
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The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority, that the nineteenth century is infatuated with was only a heresy in ...
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A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has ...
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If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
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A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
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All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
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One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
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I used to think of death ... like I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.
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One can acquire everything in solitude, except character.
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