“I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.”

“God's only excuse is that he does not exist”

“For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who pro...”

“A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.”

“Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?”

“Mathilde made an effort to use the more intimate form; she was evidently more attentive to this unusual way of speaking than to what she was saying. This use of the singular form, stripped of the t...”

“It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you.It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled.It's not a weakness.It's your best strength.”

“No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.”

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

“And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just...”

“In wars, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes”

“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”