“What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.”

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.

In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.

Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.

To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy–a vice which yields no return?

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

I’m shocked at the sexism and double standard coming out of the far right.

Nature has laid out all her art in beautifying the face; she has touched it with vermilion, planted in it a double row of ivory, made it the seat of smiles and blushes, lighted it up and enlivened it with the brightness of the eyes.

Our new watches are made entirely of double super gold. They are just a piece of gold that you can wear to the left, right, or directly on top of the other gold you own.

The safe way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.

The double pleasure of pulling down an opponent, and of raising oneself, is the charm of a politician’s life.

The brain of man, like that of all animals is double, being parted down its centre by a thin membrane. For this reason pain is not always felt in the same part of the head, but sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, and occasionally all over.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been 114 yards from the hole and made double bogey. Well, I hit a great drive, but it doesn’t matter. It’s only the next shot that matters.

This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other’s heart.