The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.

Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.

Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

Fear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure: mystery only adds thereto.

She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.

Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?