Quote collection
668 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!"
"Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue."
"When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa."
"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed."
"No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect."
"All happiness depends on courage and work."
"Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other."
"We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing."
"There is something great and terrible about suicide."
"Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge."
"Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain."
"Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion."
"Lovers have a way of using this word "nothing" which implies exactly the opposite."
"Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune."
"Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance."
"No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife."
"Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph."
"Life cannot go on without much forgetting."
"Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing."