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

Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?

On the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts.

To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.

Now literary success can only be won in solitude by persevering labor.

A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted.