It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.

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

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

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

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.

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.