“She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?”

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.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.