Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.

Handsome widows, after a twelve-month, enjoy a latitude and longitude without limit.

The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.

It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.