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

When we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.

You men do not understand the delights of a glance, of a pressure of the hand... but as for me, I swear to you that, when I listen to your voice, I feel such a deep, strange bliss that the most passionate kisses could not take its place.

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

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.

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

Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although frequently neither acknowledges the fact to himself.