A husband and wife who are in the habit of occupying separate rooms are either beings apart, or they have found happiness. Either they hate or they adore each other.

Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!

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.

With monuments as with men, position means everything.

He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.

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.

I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.