Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.

The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical.

The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.

Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.

Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.