Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.

When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances.

Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.

Let nothing dupe you! Such is the horrible maxim that acts as a solvent upon every noble feeling man experiences.

Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.