To describe happiness is to diminish it.

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.

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.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man.

It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.