A mother who is really a mother is never free.

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

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

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

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.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is art? Nature concentrated.

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.

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

Modesty is the conscience of the body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

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

The more one judges, the less one loves.

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

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

A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

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

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

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

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

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

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

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

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

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.

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

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.

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