It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.

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

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.

The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.

Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.