“All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.”

The difference breeds hatred.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.

I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction,” said Mathilde. “It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of an extreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.

Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.

Women prefer emotions to reasoning.

Men are only clever at shifting blame from their own shoulders to those of others.

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.

Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.

I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it.

When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends. Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.

Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.

Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs.

Here lies one who knew how to get around him, men who were cleverer than himself