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

Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal.

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.

A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.

Now literary success can only be won in solitude by persevering labor.