But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.

A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.