A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.

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.

What is really beautiful must always be true.