Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

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.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?