Great Throughts Treasury

"Be my brother or I will kill you."

"Chance is a nickname for Providence."

"An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought."

"Ask of all-healing, all-consoling thought salve and solace for the woe it wrought."

"Change of fashions is the tax which industry imposes on the vanity of the rich."

"Don't you know that we must always have a place where we never go but where we think we'd be happy if we did?"

"Do you think that revolutions are made with rose water?"

"Every woman in choosing a lover takes more account of the way in which other women regard the man than of her own."

"False modesty is the most decent of all deceptions."

"Happiness is not easy to find. It's very difficult to find it in yourself ? and impossible to find anywhere else."

"He who leaves the game wins it."

"His nobility led him to take a few steps in the direction of fortune, and then to despise her."

"If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France."

"Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it."

"I have three kinds of friends: those who love me, those who pay no attention to me, and those who detest me."

"I asked M.?why he'd turned down the offer of a particular post. ?I didn't want a post where the office is more important than the holder of it,? he replied."

"In order not to find life unbearable, you must accept two things: the ravages of time and the injustices of man."

"If you would estimate the extent of a woman's pride in youth, see how much remains even after she has passed the age of pleasing."

"In a country where everyone is trying to be noticed, it is better to be bankrupt than to be nothing."

"In the world you have three sorts of friends: your friends who love you, your friends who do not care about you and your friends who hate you."

"In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil."

"It is commonly supposed that the art of pleasing is a wonderful aid in the pursuit of fortune; but the art of being bored is infinitely more successful."

"It is a common saying that the most beautiful woman in the world can only give what she has. This is entirely false. She gives exactly what the recipient thinks he has received; for imagination fixes the value of this sort of favour."

"It is passion that makes man live; wisdom makes one only last."

"It is said of a lonely man that he does not appreciate the life of society. This is like saying he hates hiking because he dislikes walking in thick forest on a dark night."

"Living is a disease from the pains of which sleep eases us every sixteen hours; sleep is but a palliative, death alone is the cure."

"It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile."

"I've destroyed my passions, rather like a violent man who, finding he can't control his horse, kills it."

"Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history."

"Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death."

"Love of glory a virtue! A strange virtue truly, that calls to its aid the cooperation of all the vices, that finds stimulants in ambition, envy, vanity, sometimes even avarice! Would Titus have been Titus had he had as his ministers Sejanus, Narcissus, and Tigellinus?"

"Love, such as in society, is only the exchange of two fantasies, and the contact of two bodies."

"M.? used to warn me that I had one grave disability: I couldn't suffer fools?and their predominance?gladly. He was right and I realized that in society a fool had one great advantage: he was among his peers."

"Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life."

"Middle-class women who entertain the hope or fancy of being something in the world, lose Nature's happiness and miss Society's. They are the most unfortunate creatures I have known."

"Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame."

"Man reaches each stage of his life as a novice."

"Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource."

"Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all."

"Nature didn't tell me ?Don't be poor?; and certainly didn't say: ?Get rich?; but she did shout: ?Always be independent!?"

"Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians -- lack of power to pronounce the syllable, "No." To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character."

"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the one most surely wasted."

"No law reaches it, but all right-minded people observe it."

"Once we have resolved only to see those who will treat us morally and virtuously, reasonably and truthfully, without treating conventions, vanities and ceremonials as anything other than props of polite society, we will have to live more or less on our own."

"One must not hope to be more than one can be."

"Paris: a city of pleasures and amusements where four-fifths of the people die of grief."

"Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes."

"One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority."

"Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth."

"Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality."