“Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?”

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregious of sins. It is one step away from protestantism.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing 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.

Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.

In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?

To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

A good book is an event in my life.