Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.
Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exists for his sake.
There are situations in which hope and fear run together, in which they mutually destroy one another and lose themselves in dull indifference.
Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude.
Every man must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.
Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.
When two people are really happy about one another one can generally assume they are mistaken.
Writing history is a method of getting rid of the past.
Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.
We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.
Art is long, life is short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient.
Man is a simple being, and however rich, varied, and unfathomable he may be, the cycle of his situations is soon run through.
To live as one likes is plebian the noble man aspires to order and law.
Such is the frailty of man that even where he makes the truest and most forcible impression in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish.
A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.
The world is so full of simpletons and madmen, that one need not seek them in a madhouse.
Stupidity is without anxiety.
Women are silver dishes into which we put golden apples.
Confronted by outstanding merit, there is no way of saving one’s ego except by love.
The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before.