One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man.

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.

War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.