Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.

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.

Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.

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

Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.