“It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it. ”

“But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything--in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.''You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.”

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”

“What is the verdict of the vastest mind?Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.Man is a stranger to his own research;He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,Our being mingles with the infinite;Ourselves we never see, or come to know.”

“He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.”

“Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity.”

“I know this love, that sovereign of hearts, that soul of our souls; yet it never cost me more than a kiss and twenty kicks on the backside. How could this beautiful cause produce in you an effect so abominable.”