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.
Christianity ruined emperors, but saved peoples.
Disgrace is the synonym of discovery.
Experience is the name men give to their follies or their sorrows.
Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.
Happiness may have but one night, as glory but one day.
In love matters, keep your pen from paper.
It is easy to promise, and alas! how to forget!
Life is a sleep, love is a dream; and you have lived if you have loved.
Memory is what makes us young or old.
O world, how many hopes thou dost engulf!
Partake of love as a temperate man partakes of wine; do not become intoxicated.
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.
Reason may cure illusions, but not suffering.
Repartee is altogether a natural endowment, and is the lightning of the mind.
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!
The life of a devotee is a crusade of which the heart is the Holy Land.
The soft contralto notes of a woman’s voice are born in the immediate region of the heart.
Vanity and dignity are incompatible with each other; vain women are almost sure to be vulnerable.
Verity is nudity.
Women are charged with a fondness for nonsense and frivolity. Did not Talleyrand say, “I find nonsense singularly refreshing”?
Women, like men, may be persuaded to confess their faults; but their follies, never.