“Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.”

It is quite right what they say: the three most beautiful sights in the world are a ship in full sail, a galloping horse, and a woman dancing.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man’s appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.

A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.

All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.

Life is simply what out feelings do to us.

Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

Man is no match for woman where mischief reigns.

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

Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.

Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing.

It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.

In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

When you want to do the thing that nobody did till now, once this desire comes from your heart, then you don’t have to do anything, that desire will do anything by using your body.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

As is your sort of mind, So is your sort of search: You will find what you desire.

I have struck a city – a real city – and they call it Chicago… I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.