The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.

To speak of love is to make love.

Journalists grow accustomed to seeing evil and they let it pass; they proceed to approve it, and they end by committing it themselves.

To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions.

Virtue is always too much of a piece and too ignorant of those shades of feeling and of temperament that enable us to squint when we are placed in a false position.

Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.

The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.