The sweetest pleasures are those which are hardest to be won.
By recollecting the pleasures I have had formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them a second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of troubles now past, and which I no longer feel.
Love is three quarters curiosity.
After all, a beautiful woman without a mind of her own leaves her lover with no resource after he had physically enjoyed her charms.
There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.
Those who do not love life do not deserve it.
If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.
Love is a great poet, its resources are inexhaustible, but if the end it has in view is not obtained, it feels weary and remains silent.
When a man gets it into his head to do something, and when he exclusively occupies himself in that design, he must succeed, whatever the difficulties. That man will become Grand Vizier or Pope.
As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore, I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.
I don’t conquer, I submit.
In the mean time I worship God, laying every wrong action under an interdict which I endeavour to respect, and I loathe the wicked without doing them any injury.
To Kiss : An attempt to absorb the essence of the other person.
The pleasure I gave my lovers was a four fifth of the pleasure I experienced.
The thing is to dazzle.
The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.
Real love is the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale, for it lies in mere fantasy.
When a man is in love very little is enough to throw him into despair and as little to enhance his joy to the utmost.
Thence, I suppose, my natural disposition to make fresh acquaintances, and to break with them so readily, although always for a good reason, and never through mere fickleness.
The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led.