» A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
» Beauty is the promise of happiness.
» Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
» To describe happiness is to diminish it.
» The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
» 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.
» 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.
» 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.
» 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.
» 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.