The art of thinking is also the art of believing, because no human being at the present stage of civilization could safely call all his individual an… - André Maurois

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at the courts of the last Kings of France, idle men and women of infinite subtlety took pleasure in analysing very minutely each other's feelings and thoughts. The result was this wonderful literature that goes from La Bruyère and Pascal to Stendhal and Marcel Proust. France became a country of very refined taste. The part played by her in modern Europe was in a way similar to that played by Greece in the ancient world; she took pleasure in a delicious simplicity. Other literatures may have had more strength, more romantic violence; none had that mysterious perfection.

The longer the road to love, the keener is the pleasure to be experienced by the sensitive lover.

It is unprecedented for the men who made a revolution to remain in power after it is over. Yet one still finds revolutionaries: that proves how badly history is taught.