Marquis Custine Quotes (2 Quotes)

Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie. The rude shocks and uncomfortably constraining influences of life disappear among graceful women and poetical men they are the most deceptive beings in creation distrust and doubt cannot stand before them they create what they imagine if they do not lie to others, they do to their own hearts for illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness. Beware of grace in woman, and poetry in man -- weapons the more dangerous because the least dreaded.

A multitude of little superfluous precautions engender here a population of deputies and sub-officials, each of whom acquits himself with an air of importance and a rigorous precision, which seemed to say, though everything is done with much silence, ''Make way, I am one of the members of the grand machine of state.''