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

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.

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.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.