More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Never fear quarrels, but seek adventures. I have taught you how to handle a sword; you have thews of iron, a wrist of steel. Fight on all occasions. Fight the more for duels being forbidden, since consequently there is twice as much courage in fighting.
All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.
Nothing makes time pass more quickly or more shortens a journey than a thought which absorbs in itself all the faculties of the organization of him who thinks. External existence then resembles a sleep of which this thought is the dream. By its influence, time has no longer measure, space has no longer distance. We depart from one place, and arrive at another, that is all. Of the interval passed, nothing remains in the memory but a vague mist in which a thousand confused images of trees, mountains, and landscapes are lost.
Athos believed that everyone should be left to his own free will. He never gave advice but when it was asked, and even then he required to be asked twice. "People, in general," he said, "only ask advice not to follow it; or if they do follow it, it is for the sake of having someone to blame for having given it."
taking us for heroes or madmen—two classes of imbeciles greatly resembling each other."
