collections are amusing only in the making; afterwards they are like sporting prints without the sport. The sons of collectors inherit only the corpse of their fathers' satisfied passion.

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.

those two wholesome defects of the French people, malice and curiosity, both of which are essential to its greatness.

that sunlight of the dead which is called literature.

Words express only the feelings we know already.

The birth of love is always accompanied by the idea of solitude. A single being appears, and the rest of the world grows empty.

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