The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking; love has found.

Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.

For young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds.

In France we can cauterize wounds but we do not yet know any remedy for the injuries inflicted by a bon mot.

What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.