In women's destiny everything goes downhill except for thought, whose immortal nature it is to keep constantly rising.

Conversation as talent exists only in France. In other countries, conversation provides politeness, discussion, and friendship; in France, it is an art for which imagination and soul are certainly very welcome, but which can also provide its own secret remedies to compensate you for the absence of either or both, if you so desire.

What is love, if it can calculate and provide against its own decay?

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

Every time a new nation, America or Russia for instance, advances toward civilization, the human race perfects itself; every time an inferior class emerges from enslavement and degradation, the human race again perfects itself.

The universe is in France; outside it, there is nothing.

The education of life perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous.