The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
A woman’s sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.
The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.
A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man’s appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.
Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world – the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?
Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.
Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman!
Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
Sects differ more in name than tenets.
Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.
Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.
Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.
It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.
L’amour n’est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.
Life cannot go on without much forgetting.
Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.