When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights.

The great secret of social alchemy is to profit best from each stage in our lives, to gather all its leaves in spring, all its flowers in summer, and all its fruits in autumn.

What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.