Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.
But does not happiness come from the soul within?
Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.
The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?
Pity is woman’s sweetest charm.
Resignation is a daily suicide.
By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct.
In all lands, sailors form a race apart. They profess a congenital contempt for landlubbers. As for the tradesman, he understands nothing of sailors nor cares a fig about them. He is content to rob them if he can.
When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.
When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.
The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.
By resorting to self-resignation, the unfortunate consummate.
The duration of a couple’s passion is in proportion to the woman’s original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.
Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.
No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.
All men can bear a familiar, definite misfortune better than the cruel alternations of a fate which, from one moment to another, brings excessive joy or sorrow.
For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life.
In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is.