The desire to be singular and to astonish by ways out of the common seems to me to be the source of many virtues.

. . . it seldom happens, I think, that a man has the civility to die when all the world wishes it.

. . .the most astonishing, the most surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous. . . the greatest, the least, the rarest, the most common, the most public, the most private till today. . . I cannot bring myself to tell you: guess what it is.

When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.

There is no real evil in life, except great pain; all the rest is imaginary, and depends on the light in which we view things

We like so much to hear people talk of us and of our motives, that we are charmed even when they abuse us.

. . . long journeys are strange things: if we were always to continue in the same mind we are in at the end of a journey, we should never stir from the place we were then in . . .

Fortune is always on the side of the big battalions

There is no person who is not dangerous for someone