Quote collection
133 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregiousof sins.... It is one step away from protestantism."
"The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight."
"The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince."
"I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events."
"Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?"
"The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years."
"When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers."
"I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill."
"A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior."
"Every great action is extreme when it is undertaken. Only after it has been accomplished does it seem possible to those creatures of more common stuff."
"Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself."
"Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks."
"Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words."
"I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered."
"...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds."
"After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne."
"It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face."
"Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought."
"The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage."
"Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things."