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.

If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

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

Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.