If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
The more one judges, the less one loves.
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
