Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.
The woman you buy takes a great deal of money. The woman who gives herself to you takes all your money.
Do you know what is the hardest thing in life? To make a choice.
When in Turkey, do as the turkeys do.
A monster which devours everything – that is familiarity.
My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.
Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
It’s catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.
There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.
A girl’s coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman’s coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man’s vanity, the novice responds but to one.
Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women’s faces before the age of thirty.
It is no sin to be tempted; the wickedness lies in being overcome.
When tempted to be unfaithful, the intellectual woman will try to inspire her husband with indifference, the sentimental woman with hatred, and the passionate woman with disgust.
With a woman, always make good use of a secret. She will be proportionally grateful to you, like a scoundrel who grants his respect to an honest man he has been unable to swindle.
Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
To have one’s mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.
For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?