The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.

Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.

To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.

Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.