Happiness or unhappiness is the secret known but to one’s self and the walls – walls have ears but no tongue;.
Obsequies, madame, are for those who survive, not for the dead.
What melancholy thought,′ said the King, ’can possibly reach your heart when I place mine as a rampart before it?
This woman only became a criminal because she touched me. I am oozing with crime. She caught it off me as one may catch typhus, or cholera, or the plague!
Oh, man,” murmured d’Avrigny, “the most selfish of all animals, the most personal of all creatures, who believes the earth turns, the sun shines, and death strikes for him alone, – an ant cursing God from the top of a blade of grass!
You will live for me, as I will live for you.
I know that the world is a salon which we ought to leave politely and honestly; that is, after saluting and paying our gambling debts.
The Imperial throne was occupied by Frederic III, who had been rightly named the Peaceful, not for the reason that he had always maintained peace, but because, having constantly been beaten, he had always been forced to make it.
The difference between genius and stupidity is: genius has its limits.
Had she stabbed me with a knife, she could not have hurt me more.
How one realizes the shortness of life by the rapidity of sensations! I have only known Marguerite for two days, she has only been my mistress since yesterday, and she has already so completely absorbed my thoughts, my heart, and my life.
Les hommes ont la rage de vouloir apprendre ce qui doit leur faire de la peine.
Your father embraced me once more. I felt two grateful tears on my forehead, like the baptism of my past faults, and at the moment when I consented to give myself up to another man I glowed with pride at the thought of what I was redeeming by this new fault.
Y yo la amaba tanto, que, en medio de los transportes de su amor febril, me preguntaba si no iba a matarla para que no perteneciera nunca a otro.
El amor verdadero siempre nos hace mejores; cualquiera sea la mujer que lo inspira.
Love gives one a kind of goodness.
Les femmes sont impitoyables avec les gens qu’elles n’aiment pas.
The material world coexists alongside the ideal life, and the purest intentions are bound to the earth by ridiculous threads, but they are threads of iron and they are not easily broken.
It is my considered view that no one can invent fictional characters without first having made a lengthy study of people, just as it is impossible for anyone to speak a language that has not been properly mastered. Since I am not yet of an age to invent, I must make do with telling a tale.
It is always difficult to console a sorrow that is unknown to one...