Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.

Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

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.

Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.