I never wanted to be a public intellectual or a talking head.

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

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.

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

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

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

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

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

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

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

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

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

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

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.