Modesty is the conscience of the body.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

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.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

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.

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

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.

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Women 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.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

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.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

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.

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.

Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

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.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.