Unite a fine intelligence with a dwarfed intelligence and you precipitate a disaster; for it is necessary that equilibrium be preserved in everything.
Two enemies sometimes possess a power of clear insight into mental processes, and read each other’s minds as two lovers read in either soul.
True love is eternal, infinite, always like unto itself; it is equable, pure, without violent demonstration; white hair often covers the head but the heart that holds it is ever young.
To write a letter, and to have it posted; to get an answer, to read it and burn it; there we have correspondence stated in the simplest terms.
To those who have exhausted statecraft, nothing remains but the realm of pure thought.
To speak of love is to make love.
To seize adroitly upon the varieties of pleasure, to develop them, to impart to them a new style, an original expression, constitutes the genius of a husband.
To kill a relative of whom you are tired, is something; but to inherit his property afterwards — that is a real pleasure!
To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman’s heart.
To call a desire into being, to nourish it, to develop it, to bring it to full growth, to excite it, to satisfy it, is a complete poem of itself.
To beat a retreat with the honors of war has always been the triumph of the ablest generals.
Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short.