Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.

It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

Reading brings us unknown friends

Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.

The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.

A man's own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe.