Nothing makes time pass or shortens the way like a thought that absorbs in itself all the faculties of the one who is thinking. External existence is then like a sleep of which this thought is the dream. Under its influence, time has no more measure, space has no more distance.

The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow - so arbitrary are these transient laws.

Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.

I'm sure you're very nice, but you'd be even nicer if you went away.

Well, father, in the shipwreck of life, for life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes, I cast into the sea my useless encumbrance, that is all, and I remain with my own will, disposed to live perfectly alone, and, consequently, perfectly free. (Eugenie to her father)

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy

If it is ones lot to be cast among fools, one must learn foolishness.-The Count of Monte Cristo