To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.

Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance.

Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pygmy hatreds.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Count not thyself to have found true peace, if thou hast felt no grief; nor that then all is well if thou hast no adversary; nor that this is perfect, if all things fall out...

One exits with one’s husband — one lives with one’s lover.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being at ease with yourself

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

It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact

To loaf is a science, to loaf is to live

Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

And thus Bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pygmies, came into the world

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

Believe anything you hear about the world; nothing is too impossibly bad

Genius is intensity

Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn’t even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls

Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance; but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman’s glove, and almost always...

Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her

A jealous husband doesn ‘ t doubt his wife, but himself.

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life

Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts

If we all said people’s faces what we say behind one another’s backs, society would be impossible.

Inspiration in matters of taste will not come twice

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

The glory of surgeons is like that of actors, who exist only in their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.

Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

A woman who has made fun of her husband can love him no more

With monuments as with men, position means everything.

I am laughing to think what risks you take to try to find money in a desk by night where the legal owner can never find any by day.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, and didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent

It is not enough to be an upright man, we must be seen to be one; society does not exist on moral ideas only

It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.

A city (Paris) where great ideas perish, done to death by a witticism

They ended as all great passions do end—–by a misunderstanding…