“In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.”

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.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse – as a luxury befitting a young man.

Why not make an end of it all? My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings. What is death? A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.

My body is but the lees of my better being.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.

Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character; and then he is never made radically better for its influence.

Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.

If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.

Make the world better.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.