Remorse is impotent; it will repeat its faults. Repentance only is a true force; it puts an end to everything.

No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.

The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.

A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.

A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.

Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.