Love which is only an episode in the life of men, is the entire history of the life of women.

I never was able to believe in the existence of next year except as in a metaphysical notion.

All music, even if its occasion be a gay one, renders us pensive.

Men have made of fortune an all-powerful goddess, in order that she may be made responsible for all their blunder's.

Tombs decked by the arts can scarcely represent death as a formidable enemy; we do not, indeed, like the ancients, carve sports and dances in the sarcophagus, but thought is diverted from the bier by works that tell of immortality, even from the altar of death.

[On Napoleon:] One has the impression of an imperious wind blowing about one's ears when one is near that man.

Nature, who permits no two leaves to be exactly alike, has given a still greater diversity to human minds. Imitation, then, is a double murder; for it deprives both copy and original of their primitive existence.