Grief ennobles the commonest people because it has its own essential grandeur. To shine with the luster of grief, a person need only be sincere.

Love is the only passion which suffers neither past nor future.

Loyalty in time of need is possibly one of the noblest of victories a courtier can win over himself.

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!

Let us leave the cure of public evils to those quacks, the statesmen.