Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

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.

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.

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.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

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.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

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

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

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.

Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.