God's only excuse is that he does not exist.
Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.
Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man.