Great Throughts Treasury

"One can acquire everything in solitude - except character."

"A novel is a mirror carried along a main road."

"A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love."

"A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness."

"After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne."

"All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few."

"A good book is an event in my life."

"A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form."

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

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

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

"At La Scala it is customary to take no more than twenty minutes for those little visits one pays to boxes."

"Beauty is only the promise of happiness."

"Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit."

"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."

"God's only excuse is that he does not exist."

"Friendship has its illusions no less than love."

"An English traveler 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."

"Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness."

"Hypocrisy repels me even in love, and our great women aim for too lofty a performance. Napoleon has given them some ideas of morals and constancy."

"I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events."

"Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly and ... more irremediably, their unpleasant remarks."

"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."

"I don't mean to take advantage of my title of father to interfere with you, my son. You are free."

"I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase."

"I love her beauty, but I fear her mind."

"I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing."

"I used to think of death... like I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill."

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

"If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion."

"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."

"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."

"In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives."

"If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured."

"It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover."

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

"It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation."

"It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors of all the drawing-rooms in her face."

"It is terrifying to think how much research is needed to determine the truth of even the most unimportant fact."

"It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now."

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

"Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning can never be regained."

"It is with such eyes... that a pair of angels exiled among men... gaze at one another in mutual recognition."

"Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought."

"Man in not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable actions."

"Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge."

"Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one."

"Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness."

"Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion."

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