The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
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.
To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
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.