Great Throughts Treasury

"On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor."

"Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if I do not support it. The title attracts attention to myself."

"People happy in love have an air of intensity."

"Only great minds can afford a simple style."

"One half, the finest half of life, is hidden from the man who does not love with passion."

"Our true passions are selfish."

"Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert."

"Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it."

"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."

"Power, after love, is the first source of happiness."

"Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore."

"Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all."

"She had caprices of a marvelous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?"

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

"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."

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

"Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world - a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society."

"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."

"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."

"The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water."

"The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth."

"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."

"The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music."

"The nervous fluid in man is consumed by the brain; in women, by the heart."

"The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly."

"The only excuse for God is that He does not exist."

"The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years."

"The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority that the nineteenth century is infatuated with was only a heresy in his eyes that would pass like others."

"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same."

"The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears."

"The only unhappiness is a life of boredom."

"The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief."

"This mania of the mothers of the period, to be constantly in pursuit of a son-in-law."

"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."

"This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom."

"This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregious of sins.... It is one step away from protestantism."

"To describe happiness is to diminish it."

"To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face."

"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."

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

"When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily."

"What is really beautiful must always be true."

"Wit lasts no more than two centuries."

"When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers."

"When you want to court a woman, court her sister first"

"Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?"

"Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion."

"Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth."

"Women prefer emotions to reasoning."