15 quotes
Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser’s gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
Peut-être veulent-elles [les femmes] un peu d'hypocrisie ?
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
But does not happiness come from the soul within?
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
Musicians are seldom unemotional; a woman who could sing like that must know how to love indeed.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
There is something great and terrible about suicide.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man’s life would only serve to make a chronological table — a fool’s notion of history.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in poverty; he has need of its utmost devotion... She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)