Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them.
Un homme n'a jamais pu e lever sa ma|"tresse jusqu'a' lui; mais une femme place toujours son amant aussi haut qu'elle. A man can never elevate his mistress to his rank, but a woman can always place her lover as high as she.
Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.
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.
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
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.
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?
The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.