All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
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It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
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The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
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Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
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Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
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To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
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Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
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The man who can but sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in painting to every memory, in music to every heart! --this is the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every moment to work in obedience to the mind.
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Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
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A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
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I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
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Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
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The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
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Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
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First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time.
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Coffee falls into the stomach ... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop ... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink...
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To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
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This coffee plunges into the stomach...the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle.... Memories charge at full gallop...the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp-shooters.
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Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
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A woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea.
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First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
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Finance, like time, devours its own children.
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A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
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The more one judges, the less one loves.
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Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
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Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
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Anybody who would like to travel as an archaeologist of mores and observe men instead of rocks could find an image of the century of Louis XV in some village in Provence, that of Louis XIV in Poitou, that of even more remote times in the far reaches of Brittany. Most of these cities have fallen from some splendor that historians, more preoccupied with dates than customs, no longer speak of, but whose memory lives on, such as in Brittany, where the national character scarcely accepts the forgetting of what this country is fundamentally about. . . All of these cities have their primitive character.
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