Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.

Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.

The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.

Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.

Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.

Charity is not one of the virtues practiced on the stock market. The heart of a bank is but one of many viscera.

Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.