When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist there can only be promise of the coming woman.
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
A young bride is like a plucked flower but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
All humanity is passion without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
There is something great and terrible about suicide.
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Power is action the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion it is a joy of every moment.
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
Death unites as well as separates it silences all paltry feeling.
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.