“God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.”

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.

But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

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

Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

Our true passions are selfish.

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

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

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

I have a bad memory for facts.

Far less envy in America than in France.