No good ever becomes of a man who forgets an old friend

I have a congenital desire to contradict; my whole life is merely a chain of sad and unsuccessful contradictions to heart and mind. When faced with enthusiasm, I am seized by a midwinter freeze, and I suppose that frequent dealings with sluggish phlegmatics would have made a passionate dreamer.

Russian ladies, for the most part, cherish only Platonic love, without mingling any thought of matrimony with it; and Platonic love is exceedingly embarrassing.

Out of life's storm I carried only a few ideas - and not one feeling.

Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others.

My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason.

O vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!