To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.

Gracefulness cannot subsist without ease; delicacy is not debility; nor must a woman be sick in order to please. Infirmity, and sickness may excite our pity, but desire and pleasure require the bloom and vigor of health.

I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.

She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces... But I loved her

Definitions would be good things if we did not use words to make them.

Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.

Finance is a slave's word.