Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.
With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul’s infinite.
One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l’Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.
God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.
You cannot pluck love out of your heart as you would pull a tooth.
How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.
When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.
Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues.
The first thing necessary to win the heart of a woman is opportunity.
There are words which cut like steel.
He who best knows the world will love it least.
Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.
To say to a rich man: You are poor! is to tell the Archbishop of Granada that his sermons are worthless.
Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.
Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.
Virtue is always too much of a piece and too ignorant of those shades of feeling and of temperament that enable us to squint when we are placed in a false position.
Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.