We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

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

No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.

Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.

Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.

The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.

When she lives at his palace, the maiden niece of a bishop can pass for a respectable woman because, if she has a love affair, she is obliged to hoodwink her uncle.