Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!

For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?

Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.

Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird.

Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.