"Les plaisirs et les soins de l'ambition la plus heureuse, même du pouvoir sans bornes, ne sont rien auprès du bonheur intime que donnent les relations de tendresse et d'amour. Je suis homme avant d'être prince, et, quand j'ai le bonheur d'aimer, ma maîtresse s'adresse à l'homme et non au prince."

"In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives."

"La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur."

"A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness."

"In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future."

"It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover."

"The only excuse for God is that He does not exist."

"I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events."

"True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things."

"The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse — as a luxury befitting a young man."

"Je ne vois qu'une règle: être clair. Si je ne suis pas clair, tout mon monde est anéanti."

"Le même esprit ne dure que deux cents ans."

"Comme homme, j'ai le cœur 3 ou 4 fois moins sensible, parce que j'ai 3 ou 4 fois plus de raison et d'expérience du monde, ce que vous autres femmes appelez dureté de cœur.'Comme homme, j'ai la ressource d'avoir des maîtresses. Plus j'en ai et plus le scandale est grand, plus j'acquiers de réputation et de brillant dans le monde."

"Ce sera la noblesse de leur style qui, dans quarante ans, rendra illisibles nos écrivains de 1840."

"(Le Centre du Lac) … et le hardi promontoire qui sépare les deux branches du lac, celle de Come, si voluptuense et celle qui court vers Lecco, plein de sévérité; aspect sublime et gracieux, que le site le plus renommé du monde, la baie de Naples, égale, mais ne surpasse point..."

"L'amour a toujours été pour moi la plus grande des affaires ou plutôt la seule."

"On peut tout acquérir dans la solitude, hormis du caractère."

"Presque tous les malheurs de la vie viennent des fausses idées que nous avons sur ce qui nous arrive. Connaître à fond les hommes, juger sainement des événements, est donc un grand pas vers le bonheur."

"Revenir souvent ici (sur le lac de Côme) est comme une goutte de poison ; ça donne envie de ne jamais partir."

"Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all."

"The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free."

"It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind."

"The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty."

"Henceforth, virtue was not the exercise of discipline, self-control or benevolence for the sake of others, but the expression of the right opinions of the moment."

"It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow."

"Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking."

"Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion."

"In the British public service nothing succeeds like failure: indeed, failure is success, if looked on in the right way, namely as something requiring yet further intervention in people's lives to amend."

"In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it."

"Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children."

"Resentment is one of the few emotions that never lets you down, but it’s useless. In fact, it’s worse than useless, it’s harmful, and we all suffer from it at some time in our lives."

"Loose language suggests loose thought."

"If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not."

"Equality can only be measured by outcome: and this means the imposition of racial quotas. The job of the Senior Executive is therefore to be a senior racist."

"Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism."

"Whereas fortitude was once regarded as a virtue, it has come to be regarded as a kind of reprehensible and deliberate obtuseness, to be utterly condemned as treason to the self (there is no fury like a non-judgmentalist scorned)."

"If a lack of money had prevented people from improving their lot, then mankind would still be living in the caves: unless you believe that investment capital first arrived from outer space."

"To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute."

"What youth considers liberation, maturity considers tasteless excess."

"There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic."

"Modernity is the most transient of qualities."

"The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence."

"It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised."

"The main difference between working in an NHS hospital in Britain and a prison is that prison is much safer."

"Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy."

"It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition."

"There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy."

"The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men’s souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction."

"We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious."

"Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against."