A vocation is born to us all; happily most of us meet promptly our twin, – occupation.
The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.
Handsome widows, after a twelve-month, enjoy a latitude and longitude without limit.
A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.
An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband’s infidelities.
Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.
Only when one has learned to acknowledge that wiser minds have made better words to come out of our mouths may we truly, then, begin to speak them.
One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.
Six weeks with a fever is an eternity.
One exits with one’s husband – one lives with one’s lover.
Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.
If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man’s life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool’s notion of history.
True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe’s conceit.
I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
If we all said to people’s faces what we say behind one another’s backs, society would be impossible.
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
Suffering predisposes the mind to devoutness; and most young girls, prompted by instinctive tenderness, lean towards mysticism, the obscurer side of religion.
Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.