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.

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

I am bound to add that the excess in too little has ever proved in me more dangerous than the excess in too much; the last may cause indigestion, but the first causes death.

Real love is the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale, for it lies in mere fantasy.

I will begin with this confession: whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent.

I learned very early that our health is always impaired by some excess either of food or abstinence, and I never had any physician except myself.

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.