A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.

One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.

The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.

Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.

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

No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.