For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her.
They had…finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.
In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success
The Devil teaches women what they are – or they would teach it to the Devil if he did not know.
Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted.
(it was) beautiful, like so many senseless things.
Men are all the same. Novelty amongst themselves displeases and upsets them – but if the novelty is wearing a skirt, they go crazy f
He was terrified by the sublime horror of it, for intensity of feeling, carried to this degree, is sublime. (“A Woman’s Vengeance”)
Fools – in other words most people – imagine that it would be a wonderful achievement to be able to recover our youth; but those who know life are aware how little it would profit us. (“A Woman’s Vengeance”)
I did not want to be taken for a fool – the typical French reason for performing the worst of deeds without remorse.
For with dandies, a joke is the only way of making yourself respected.
Night, which in Autumn seems to fall from the sky so suddenly, chilled us…
Dandies, who – as you know – scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that simpleton Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind.
We priests are the surgeons of souls, and it is our duty to deliver them of shameful secrets they would fain conceal, with hands careful to neither wound no pollute.
Yet, whether to the glory or to the shame of human nature, in what we call pleasure (with an excess of scorn, perhaps) there are abysses as deep as those of love.
Passions are less mischievous than boredom for passions tend to diminish and boredom increase.