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

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.

Jean Jacques Rousseauis nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.... For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.

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

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.