The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

In a world of hunchbacks, a fine figure becomes a monstrosity.

Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.

One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.

No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.

Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.