Novelist

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.

It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

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.

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.