The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.
War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.
Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.