It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.
Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
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.
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
A good book is an event in my life.
Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.
The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.
People happy in love have an air of intensity.
A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he
The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.
There is no such thing as "natural law": this expression is nothing but old nonsense... Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold, in short, need.
Every great action is extreme when it is undertaken. Only after it has been accomplished does it seem possible to those creatures of more common stuff.
After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.
A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.
The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.
Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.
Sometimes the impact of Mozart's music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.
I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.
Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.
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.
A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: