A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry.

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.

Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.

In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.

The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.