Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.

Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.

Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.

Lovers have a way of using this word "nothing" which implies exactly the opposite.

Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.