“A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.”

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

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.

Unconditional love is all you have. You can’t overdose on love, you never can. It’s a beautiful thing.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.

Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.

It was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

It is easy to love your friend, but sometimes the hardest lesson to learn is to love your enemy.

I remember a time when everybody I loved hated me because I hated them.

It’s better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone – so far.