In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!

Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?

True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe's conceit.

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.