If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.
Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.
The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight.