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141 " si on était éclairé sur son véritable bonheur, on ne le chercherait jamais hors des bornes prescrites par les Lois et la Religion. "
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos , Les Liaisons dangereuses
142 " To know you without loving you, to love you without being constant to you, are both equally impossible. "
143 " … the woman who has a will of her own is not as much in love as she professes. "
144 " Le luxe absorbe tout : on le blâme, mais il faut l'imiter ; et le superflu finit par priver du nécessaire. "
145 " Moreover, a remark I am astonished you have not made, is, that nothing is so difficult in love, as to write what one does not feel. "
146 " I feel only too keenly how difficult it is to resist an overpowering feeling "
147 " I supplemented these with the help of reading: but do not imagine it was all of the kind you suppose. I studied our manners in novels, our opinions in the philosophers; I even went to the most severe moralists to see what they expected from us; and I thus made sure of what one could do, of what one ought to think, and of how one must appear. "
148 " In that debased society love is viewed as a failing, a weakness, and something to be avoided at all costs. "
149 " So many women do not see in their present lover their future enemy "
150 " I come, madame, after a stormy night during which I never closed an eye, after suffering without cease now the turmoil of a consuming passion, now the utter exhaustion of every faculty of my being, I come to you to seek the peace I need, but which as yet I cannot hope to enjoy. "
151 " You make despotism itself seem something to be cherished "
152 " The god of love himself, preparing my crown, cannot decide between the myrtle and the laurel, or rather he will weave them together to honor my triumph "
153 " I have looked into my own heart, I have studied in it the heart of others. "
154 " The more you deny being a fool, the bigger fool you look "
155 " You yourself, my love, whose strategy is masterly, have triumphed a hundred times, I consider, more through luck than good judgement. "
156 " A letter is the portrait of the soul. "
157 " What I blame myself for most, and what, nevertheless, I must tell you about, is that I am afraid I did not defend myself as well as I was able. I don't know how that happened. I most certainly am not in love with Monsieur de Valmont, quite the contrary: yet there were moments when it was as if I were. "
158 " Me voilà comme la Divinité; recevant les vœux opposés des aveugles mortels, et ne changeant rien à mes décrets immuables. – La Marquise de Merteuil "
159 " Without doubt a letter appears very unnecessary when we can see one another freely — What could it say that a word, or look, or even silence itself, could not express? "
160 " Me voilà comme la Divinité; recevant les vœux opposés des aveugles mortels, et ne changeant rien à mes décrets immuables. "