"I established myself in a fairly remote country house and entertained my imagination with various means of transport. Here is how I betook myself to heaven. I attached to myself a number of bottles of dew, and the heat of the sun, which attracted it, drew me so high that I finally emerged above the highest clouds. But the sun's attraction of the dew drew me upwards so rapidly that instead of approaching the Moon, as I intended, I seemed to be farther from it than when I started. I broke open some of the bottles and felt my weight overcome the attraction and bring me back towards the earth."

"With my equipment, I walked toward a thatched cottage from which I saw smoke emerging. I was scarcely within pistol-shot range when I was surrounded by a large number of savages. They were very surprised to meet me, because I think I was the first they had seen dressed in bottles. And, to confound even more all the interpretations they might have given to this attire, I walked almost without touching the ground. They could not know that any jostling of my body raised me off the ground because the dew was heated by the noonday sun and that more bottles of dew might have taken me upwards into the air."

"I think the Moon is a world like this one, and the Earth is its moon." My friends greeted this with a burst of laughter. "And maybe," I told them, "someone on the Moon is even now making fun of someone else who says that our globe is a world."

"I was presented to Monsieur de Montmagny, the viceroy. He asked my nationality, name, and rank. When I had satisfied him by recounting the success of my voyage, which he either believed or pretended to, he kindly lent me a room in his apartment. I was happy to meet a man capable of enlightened opinions, one who was not surprised when I told him that the earth must have turned beneath me while I was aloft. Having begun my ascent two leagues from Paris, I had come down in almost a straight line to Canada."

"Plain as a pike-staff."

"A flatterer can risk everything with great personages."

"Pride and conceit were the original sin of man."

"I wish you all sorts of prosperity with a little more taste."

"It may be said that his wit shines at the expense of his memory."

"A smart daughter ought not to examine her future husband too closely. She ought to consider it a pleasure to find one agreeable to her father."

"I don't know any more than you what the future will hold. But my point of view is different. You see despair and I see cause for hope. I read the future in a way that is more agreeable than you do."

"The pleasure of talking is the inextinguishable passion of a woman, coeval with the act of breathing."

"The more I have to suffer, the more my character will grow."

"A good doctor pursues his calling without any regard to a bad result. Otherwise, teaching in medical school might be called into question and where would we be then?"

"To forbid wine to a man of your type is the same as forbidding women to a man of a different sort."

"Isocrates was in the right to insinuate, in his elegant Greek expression, that what is got over the Devil's back is spent under his belly."

"In order to know the worth of a virtuous husband, is it not necessary for the wife to be dispirited herself? First, give her a young man of twenty, and not only will she be fine, she'll have a reasonable husband."

"Facts are stubborn things."

"Je l'ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr!"

"Dieu des Juifs, tu l'emportes!"

"Hâtons-nous aujourd'hui de jouir de la vie. Qui sait si nous serons demain?"

"Pour réparer des ans l'irréparable outrage."

"Aux petits des oiseaux il donne leur pâture, Et sa bonté s’étend sur toute la nature."

"Ariane, ma sœur, de quel amour blessée,Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée."

"C'est toi qui l'as nommé."

"Ce n'est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée: C'est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée."

"Tout m'afflige et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire."

"Mon unique espérance est dans mon désespoir."

"Jamais on ne vaincra les Romains que dans Rome."

"Un bienfait reproché tient toujours lieu d’offense."

"L'innocence enfin n'a rien à redouter."

"Derrière un voile, invisible et présente, J'étais de ce grand corps l'âme toute-puissante."

"Ce que je sais le mieux, c'est mon commencement."

"Vous êtes empereur, Seigneur, et vous pleurez!"

"Ainsi que la vertu, le crime a ses dégrés; Et jamais on n'a vu la timide innocence Passer subitement à l'extrême licence."

"For us, a sorrowful generation consumed by visions and insulted by his angelic sloth, Musset is fourteen times worse! O the tedious tales and proverbs! O his Nuits! His Rolla, Namouna, La Coupe. It’s all so French, which is to say unbearable to the nth degree; French, but not Parisian. Another work by that odious genius who inspired Rabelais, Voltaire and Jean La Fontaine, with notes by M. Taine! How vernal, Musset’s mind! And how delightful, his love! Like paint on enamel, his dense poetry! We will savor French poetry endlessly, in France. Every grocer’s son can reel off something Rollaesque, every seminarian has five hundred rhymes hidden in his notebook. At fifteen, these passionate impulses give boys boners; at sixteen, they’ve already resolved to recite their lines with feeling; at eighteen, even seventeen, every schoolboy who can write a Rolla, does—and they all do! Some may even still die from it. Musset couldn’t do anything: there were visions behind the gauze curtains: he closed his eyes. French, half-dead, dragged from tavern to schooldesk, the beautiful corpse has died, and, ever since, we needn’t waste our time trying to rouse him with our abominations!"

"Je ne puis;—malgré moi l'infini me tourmente."

"The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near."

"As all the perfumes of the vanished day Rise from the earth still moistened with the dew So from my chastened soul beneath thy ray Old love is born anew."

"Great artists have no country."

"Me puis-je mieux venger, si vous me trahissez, Que d'aimer à vos yeux ce que vous haïssez?"

"Un monarque a souvent des lois à s'imposer; Et qui veut pouvoir tout ne doit pas tout oser."

"Chaque instant de la vie est un pas vers la mort."

"Qui se vainc une fois peut se vaincre toujours."

"Ils etaient plus que rois; ils sont moindres qu'esclaves."

"Rome n'est plus dans Rome, elle est toute où je suis."

"L'amour-propre est la source en nous de tous les autres."

"C'est n'avoir pas perdu tout votre temps à Rome, Que vous savoir ainsi défendre en galant homme: Vous avez de l'esprit, si vous n'avez du cœur."

"Un véritable roi n'est ni mari ni père; Il regarde son trône, et rien de plus."

"On a peine à haïr ce qu'on a bien aimé, Et le feu mal éteint est bientôt rallumé."