Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window.
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.
It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father’s craft.
Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman’s destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser’s gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.
I am not deep, but I am very wide.
Life is simply what out feelings do to us.
With monuments as with men, position means everything.
A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
If certain women walk straight into adultery, there are many others who cling to numerous hopes, and commit sin only after wandering through a maze of sorrows.
Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders.
Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!
Too great a display of delicacy can and does sometimes infringe upon de-cency.
A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.
A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.