Without patience, without absence of anger, no one can be called a politician.
The suspicion that a rival is loved is painful enough already, but to have the love that he inspires in her confessed to one in detail by the woman whom one adores is without doubt the acme of suffering.
After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.
Old age is nothing but the absence of madness, the loss of illusion and passion.
True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.
Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive.
People happy in love have an air of intensity.
It seems that my destiny is to die dreaming.
To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.
A novel is a mirror travelling down the road.
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
He, at least, has no fear of bad taste.
It is something like love at first sight. An instant reveals to you what your heart had needed for a long time without recognizing it.
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
Feminine delicacy was carried to excess in Mme de Renal.
Want of exercise was beginning to affect his health and to give him the weak and excitable character of a young German student.
Misery destroys judgment.
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.
It is because I was foolish then that I am now wise. O philosopher who see nothing save in a flash, how short is your vision! Your eye is not made to follow the underground working of the passions. FRAU VON GOETHE This.
An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.
Puns are incompatible with murder.
It seemed to Julian that there was far too much hair in his wig.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
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.
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.
Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
Has there ever been anything more absurd than a belief in the profundity or the wickedness of the Parisian character?
Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
But if I take this pleasure with so much prudence and circumspection, it ceases to be a pleasure for me. LOPE DE VEGA Immediately.
The more one pleases generally, the less one pleases profoundly.
To describe happiness is to diminish it.
If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
All right, two mornings from now I'll fight a duel with a fellow known for his calm collectedness and remarkable skill…'Very remarkable,' said his Mephistophelian side. ‘He never misses.
To the Happy Few!
Each man for himself in that desert of egoism which is called life.
To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
Here are my politics: I love music and painting; a good book is an event for me; I'm going on forty-four. How much time do I have left? Fifteen, twenty, thirty years at most? Very well! I maintain that in thirty years ministers will be a bit shrewder, but just about as honest as they are today.
The presence of danger inspires a sensible man with genius, raising him, so to speak, above himself. In the case of the man of imagination, it inspires him with romances, which may indeed be bold, but which are frequently absurd.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
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.
Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.
A girl of sixteen had a complexion like a rose, and she put on rouge.
Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
These gentlemen, although of the highest nobility,' thought Julien, 'are not in the least boring like the people who come to dine with M. de La Mole; and I can see why,' he added a moment later,'they are not ashamed to be indecent.
