Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.

If certain women walk straight into adultery, there are many others who cling to numerous hopes, and commit sin only after wandering through a maze of sorrows.

The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.

In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.

How natural it is to destroy what we cannot possess, to deny what we do not understand, and to insult what we envy!

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.