It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.

If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

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.

No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.

The great secret of social alchemy is to profit best from each stage in our lives, to gather all its leaves in spring, all its flowers in summer, and all its fruits in autumn.