“How natural it is to destroy what we cannot possess, to deny what we do not understand, and to insult what we envy!”

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.

As a rule, only the poor are generous.

Everybody all over the world takes a wife’s estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.

People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.

A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman’s destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.

Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man.

A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance.

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative.

Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals – that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.

We may say, that not only the soul (the mirror of an indestructible universe) is indestructible, but also the animal itself is, although its mechanism is frequently destroyed in parts.

I think good private equity investors create a lot more economic value than they destroy.

Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.

The same forces of nature which enable us to fly to the stars, enable us also to destroy our star.

If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

Transformation is something I cannot explain – too much analysis might destroy it.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.