Kindness steers no easy course. Attributing it to character, we seldom recognize the secret efforts of a noble heart, whereas we reward really wicked people for the evil they refrain from committing.
A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.
Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.
Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted.
Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.
Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret.
Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.
Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.
Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.
Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.
At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible.
Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.
Ah! the soft starlight of virgin eyes.
To have fame follow us is well, but it is not a desirable avant-courier.
The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.
Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.
Our most natural feelings are those we are loath to confess, and fatuity is among them.
The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?