Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes.
One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.
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.
One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.