To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

Novelty is both delightful and deceptive.

People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.

The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.

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.