How strange life is, how fickle! How little is needed for one to be ruined or saved! - Guy de Maupassant

I reason everything out, and usually analyze my tastes too well to succumb to them blindly. And that's my chief defect, the real cause of my weakness. But this woman has taken possession of me in spite of myself, in spite of my fear and my knowledge of her; and she possesses me as if she had plucked out, one after the other, my every last aspiration.

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.

...perhaps, also this short embrace may infuse in their veins a little of this thrill which they would not have known without it, and will give to those two dead souls, brought to life in a second, the rapid and divine sensation of this intoxication, of this madness which gives to lovers more happiness in an instant than other men can gather during a whole lifetime.