In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.

When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.

The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.

Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage.

In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.