Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

A woman questions the man who loves exactly as a judge questions a criminal. This being so, a flash of the eye, a mere word, an inflection of the voice or a moment's hesitation suffice to expose the fact, betrayal or crime he is attempting to conceal.

People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.

The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.