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

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

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

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

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

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

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.

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

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

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

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

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.