“The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.”

The greater a man’s talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

The more you judge, the less you love.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

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 great virtue of being alone is that your mind can go its own way.

History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers.

He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

I am a great admirer of other actors, but I never compete with other actors. I always compete with what I did last, and I’m my own most vicious critic. So I’m always trying to do it better.

I can’t tell you how great it is to get away with a girlfriend for four days shopping in Paris. Now that’s what I call a vacation.

Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.