Secrecy is best taught by starting with ourselves.

It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyse before we can live happily in this world.

Men's hearts and faces are always wide asunder; women's are not only in close connection, but are mirror-like in the instant power of reflection.

When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.

The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.

What we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of oneself.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.