When you want to obtain something touching a man’s self-respect, you must spare his pride even the appearance of suffering.
For hearts which have long suffered, happiness is like dew on soil parched by the sun: both heart and earth absorb this beneficial rain as it falls on them, and nothing appears on the surface.
Death, according to the care we take to be on good or bad terms with it, is either a friend which will rock us as gently as a nursing mother or an enemy which will savagely tear apart body and soul.
The Countess G – – insists upon it that he is a vampire.
Let the rich man rediscover the poor one; the free man the pisoner; and the resurrected man the corpse.
Well, monsieur, I am suffering at this moment something strange, and that is the satisfaction of despair. There is in certain souls – and I have just discovered that mine is of the number – a real satisfaction in the assurance that all is lost, and the time is come to yield.
Il faut avoir voulu mourir, pour savoir combien il est bon de vivre.
One must take the world as one finds it.
My friend, let us enjoy the present and give no thought to the evils of the future.
Desrues was, however, I.
Chaque homme a sa passion qui le mord au fond du coeur, comme chaque fruit son ver.
I have only two enemies: I shall not say two conquerors, because with persistence I can make them bow to my will: they are distance and time. The third and most awful is my condition as a mortal man. Only that can halt me on the path I have chosen before I have reached my appointed goal. Everything else is planned for.
Les amis d’aujourd’hui sont les ennemis de demain.
Let me struggle like a woman- my strength lies in my weakness. – Milady.
A good deed is never lost.
Fortune is a courtesan; favorable yesterday, she may turn her back tomorrow.
The reign of Mazarin is over, but that of the financiers is begun. They have the money; your majesty will not often see much of it. To live under the paw of these hungry wolves is hard for a man who reckoned upon independence.
Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shaksepeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet. I name only the most important.
Tigers and crocodiles with two legs are more dangerous than the rest.
I have seen Russians devour, without being visibly inconvenienced, vegetable substances which would infallibly have killed a Neapolitan or an Arab.