Words express only the feelings we know already.

The arts are good and providential in that they allow the soul to imitate the movements of love, and to feel love without its being returned - which, perhaps, is the only way of feeling it permanently.

history ... a sort of immortality turned upside down. Her life stretched backwards through ten centuries.

marriage was a calamity, but it was not an occupation.

that sunlight of the dead which is called literature.

The affairs of the royal house form a subject of conversation for those who, as a rule, would have no conversation.

... love always betrays its intentions.