Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as equality to give play to their heart.
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!
Necessity is ofter the spur to genius.
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
The more one judges, the less one loves.
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
Great love affairs start with champagne and end with tisane.
Woman are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
What is art? Nature concentrated.
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
When woman love us they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
Every is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.
Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
Power is not revealed by striking hard or ofter, but by striking true.
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night thee is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
To provoke laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
Passion is universal humanity. without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
It is easy to sit up and take notice. What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.
Love is the poetry of the senses.
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
All happiness depends on courage and work.
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
There is something great and terrible about suicide.
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self - denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child - bearing.
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared about this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys.
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
The face is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
The most virtuous woman have something withing them, something that is never chaste.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.
A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
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