Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.
Nothing is as heady as the wine of misfortune.
Rich women need not fear old age; their gold can always create about them any feelings necessary to their happiness.
To lese-majeste and contempt of court, we must add the crime of lese-million, that fearful indignity we visit on the rich when we expose the impotence of gold.
Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage.
Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.
Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?
The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm.
Once she has committed sin, there is nothing left for the Protestant woman, whereas the Catholic Church, hope of forgiveness makes a woman sublime.
We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day.
To man, faith; to woman, doubt. She bears the heavier burden. Does not woman invariably suffer for two?
Temperament is the thermometer of character.
How fondly swindlers coddle their dupes! No mother is as caressing or thoughtful towards her adored child as a merchant in hypocrisy toward his milch-cow.
Thought is the only treasure that God sets outside all power and keeps to serve as a secret link among the unhappy.
An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.
A man’s own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe.
Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.
A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste.
Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.