"Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it."

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

"Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?"

"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 more one judges, the less one loves."

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

"Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys."

"A mother who is really a mother is never free."

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

"Finance, like time, devours its own children."

"Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better."

"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."

"Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love."

"Modesty is the conscience of the body."

"The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute."

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

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

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

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

"Love is a game in which one always cheats."

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

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

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

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

"Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane."

"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."

"What is art? Nature concentrated."

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

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

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

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

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

"Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless."

"There is something great and terrible about suicide."

"Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing."

"Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich."