C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917. Alfred de Musset
A lively retrospect summons back to us once more our youth, with vivid reflex of its early joys and unstained pleasures. 1 Christianity ruined emperors, but saved peoples. 2 Disgrace is the synonym of discovery. 3 Experience is the name men give to their follies or their sorrows. 4 Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits. 5 Happiness may have but one night, as glory but one day. 6 In love matters, keep your pen from paper. 7 It is easy to promise, and alas! how to forget! 8 Life is a sleep, love is a dream; and you have lived if you have loved. 9 Memory is what makes us young or old. 10 O world, how many hopes thou dost engulf! 11 Partake of love as a temperate man partakes of wine; do not become intoxicated. 12 Perfection does not exist. To understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness. 13 Reason may cure illusions, but not suffering. 14 Repartee is altogether a natural endowment, and is the lightning of the mind. 15 Taxes are a universal burden in moral as well as in civil life. There is not a pleasure, social or otherwise, which is not assessed by fate at its full value! 16 The life of a devotee is a crusade of which the heart is the Holy Land. 17 The soft contralto notes of a woman’s voice are born in the immediate region of the heart. 18 Vanity and dignity are incompatible with each other; vain women are almost sure to be vulnerable. 19 Verity is nudity. 20
Women are charged with a fondness for nonsense and frivolity. Did not Talleyrand say, “I find nonsense singularly refreshing”? 21 Women, like men, may be persuaded to confess their faults; but their follies, never. 22
