A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

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.

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.