Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.

Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.

Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.

Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.

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

It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.

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.