- All human power is a compound of time and patience.
- When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
- A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
- 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
- There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
- Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
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.
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
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.
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
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul. - 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.
- To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.
- Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God
- A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur.
- The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.
- A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry
- The man whom fate employs to awaken love in the heart of a young girl is often unaware of his work and therefore leaves it uncompleted
- Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.
- Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
- True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
- No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love
- Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.
- The married couples who intend to love each other during their whole life have no notion of a honeymoon; for them it has no existence, or rather its existence is perennial; they are like the immortals who do not understand death.
- Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
- What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
- The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.
- A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected at least one woman.
- A husband never loses anything by appearing to believe in the fidelity of his wife, by preserving an air of patience and by keeping silence. Silence especially troubles a woman amazingly.
- 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.
- The moment a wife decides to break her marriage vow she reckons her husband as everything or nothing.
- We talked together through that silence in the language of thought. Nothing is more rapturous than these mute conversations.
- Like an eagle darting on his prey, he took her utterly to him, set her on his knees, and felt with an indescribable intoxication the voluptuous pressure of this girl, whose richly developed beauties softly enveloped him.
- Men are like that, they can resist sound argument, yet yield to a glance
- I longed for a companion to the kingdom of Light; I wished to show you that morsel of mud, I find you bound to it.
- Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?
- Therefore you see, my friend, that I am not a woman. You do wrong to love me. What! Am I to leave the ethereal regions of my pretended strength, make myself humbly small, cringe like the hapless female of all species that you may lift me up? and then, when I, helpless and broken, ask you for help, when I need your arm, you will repulse me! No, we can never come to terms.
- But the maladies by which a man is afflicted do not nullify the sum total of human passion. To our shame be it spoken, a woman is never so much attached to us as when we are sick.
- In order that a woman may be able to keep a cook, may be finely educated, may possess the sentiment of coquetry, may have the right to pass whole hours in her boudoir lying on a sofa, and may live a life of soul, she must have at least six thousand francs a year if she lives in the country, and twenty thousand if she lives at Paris.
- If a man would have the right to make stepping-stones of all the heads which crowd a drawing-room, he must be the lover of some artistic woman of fashion.
- The Spirit of Love has acquired strength, the result of all vanquished terrestrial passions.
- If there are differences between one moment of pleasure and another, a man can always be happy with the same woman.
- Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colors employed in painting.
- Pleasure being caused by the union of sensation and sentiment, we can say without fear of contradiction that pleasures are a sort of material ideas.
- Each night ought to have its menu.
- None but the dupes, who fondly imagine that they are useful to their like, can interest themselves in laying down rules for political guidance amid events which neither they nor any one else foresees, nor ever will foresee.
- Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods.
- Judged from a literary point of view, Nathan lacks style and cultivation. Like most young men, ambitious of literary fame, he disgorges to-day what he acquired yesterday.
- There is often more pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!
- If love is a child, passion is a man.
- In the matter of repartees literary celebrities are often not as quick as women.
- If you have desired your object only for one day, your love perhaps will not last more than three nights.
- Hey who listen to only one bell hears only one sound.
- We must all agree that legality would be a fine thing for social scoundrelism IF THERE WERE NO GOD.
- Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue
- Friendship is the bond between a pair of kindred souls, united in their strength, and yet independent. Let us be friends and comrades to bear jointly the burden of life.
- A lover teaches a wife all that her husband has concealed from her.
- In a lover the coarsest desire always shows itself as a burst of honest admiration.
- When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.
- Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival.
