“To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.”

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.

It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.

Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.

To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You’re supposed to seem bored.

The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

It’s not the absence of fear. It’s overcoming it. Sometimes you’ve got to blast through and have faith.

Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the ability to act effectively, in spite of fear.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

Absence may or may not make the heart grow fonder, but it certainly freshens the eye.

Depression is the absence of hope.