Life often seems like a long shipwreck of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love. - The shores of existence are strewn with them.

Providence protects us in all the details of our lot.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

Conversation as talent exists only in France. In other countries, conversation provides politeness, discussion, and friendship; in France, it is an art for which imagination and soul are certainly very welcome, but which can also provide its own secret remedies to compensate you for the absence of either or both, if you so desire.

It is obvious that the most despotic forms of social organization would be suitable for inert men who are satisfied with the situation fate has placed them in, and that the most abstract form of democratic theory would be practicable among sages guided only by their reason. The only problem is to what degree it is possible to excite or to contain the passions without endangering public happiness.

There is no second country for an Englishman, except a ship and the sea.

What is love, if it can calculate and provide against its own decay?