I knew by heart a great many things, but nothing in order, so that my head was like a sponge, swollen but empty.

I fell in love with all the poets one after another; but being of an impressionable nature the last acquaintance disgusted me with the rest.

I had made of myself a great warehouse of odds and ends, so that having no more thirst after drinking of the novel and the unknown, I became an oddity myself.
Nevertheless, about me there was still something of youth: it was the hope of my heart, which was still childlike.
That hope, which nothing had withered or corrupted and which love had exalted to excess, had now received a mortal wound.

The perfidy of my mistress had struck deep, and when I thought of it, I felt in my soul a swooning away, the convulsive flutter of a wounded bird in agony.
Society, which works so much evil, is like that serpent of the Indies whose habitat is under a shrub, the leaves of which afford the antidote to its venom; in nearly every case it brings the remedy with the wound it causes.

For example, the man whose life is one of routine, who has his business cares to claim his attention upon rising, visits at one hour, loves at another, can lose his mistress and suffer no evil effects.