On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.

When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.

Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.

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.

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

To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.