When she lives at his palace, the maiden niece of a bishop can pass for a respectable woman because, if she has a love affair, she is obliged to hoodwink her uncle.

No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.

I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me . . . to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.

When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she.

They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them.

Heaven should be kind to stupid people, for no one else can be consistently.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!