There are words which cut like steel.

As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative.

A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.

By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct.

Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.

Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.

There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.