Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.

Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.

A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible.

Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.

You may imitate, but never counterfeit.