"But he looks no more than thirty. He's very handsome-- so much you will admit; nor will you deny that he is very wealthy and very powerful; the greatest nobleman in Brittany. He will make me a great lady.''God made you that, Aline."
"And yet she was content to pair off with this dull young adventurer in the tarnished lace! It was, he supposed, the sort of thing to be expected of a sex that all philosophy had taught him to regard as the maddest part of a mad species."
"Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence."
"Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured."
"We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose."
"You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind."
"It is a futile and ridiculous struggle—but then... it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous."
"Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encyclopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species."
"With you it is always the law, never equity."
"What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess- unless he is a coward."
"Oh, you are mad!" she exclaimed, quite out of patience."Possibly. But I like my madness."