Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

Our true passions are selfish.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.