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

The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.

They ended as all great passions do end - by a misunderstanding.

Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.