Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.

I am not deep, but I am very wide.

One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy--a vice which yields no return?

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.