Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird.
On the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts.
The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
The happier a man, the more apt he is to tremble. In hearts exclusively tender, anxiety and jealousy are in exact proportion to happiness.
Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.
Charity is not one of the virtues practiced on the stock market. The heart of a bank is but one of many viscera.
The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.
When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she.
Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
A woman, even a prude, is not long at a loss, however dire her plight. She would seen always to have in hand the fig leaf our Mother Eve bequeathed to her.
What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?
In France we can cauterize wounds but we do not yet know any remedy for the injuries inflicted by a bon mot.
Reproach is usually honest, which is more than can be said of praise.
When she lives at his palace, the maiden niece of a bishop can pass for a respectable woman because, if she has a love affair, she is obliged to hoodwink her uncle.
The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share.
Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.
No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.
Old maids claw as cats do. They not only inflict wounds but experience pleasure in doing so. Nor will they fail to remind their victims of the blood drawn.