Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book.... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.

Jean Jacques Rousseauis nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.... For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.

A good book is an event in my life.

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.