An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the 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.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

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.

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.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

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.