Love is a great poet, its resources are inexhaustible, but if the end it has in view is not obtained, it feels weary and remains silent.

A man who makes known his love by words is a fool.

I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.

We love without heeding reason, and cease to love in the same manner.

As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore, I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.

The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led.