Memory seldom fails when its office is to show us the tombs of our buried hopes.

I see little alteration at Lyons since I formerly passed through it. Its manufactories are, nevertheless, flourishing, though less improvement than could be expected is visible in the external aspect of the place.

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it.

Our weaknesses are the indigenous produce of our characters; but our strength is the forced fruit.

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory . . .

The most certain mode of making people content with us is to make them content with themselves.

We have a reading, a talking, and a writing public. When shall we have a thinking?