To forestall the desires of a lover is a fault in women which few men forgive. The majority of them see but degradation in this celestial flattery.
When a love-letter is so well written that it would afford pleasure to any third person who might read it, it emanates most assuredly from the brain, and not from the heart.
It takes an old woman to read an old woman’s face.
It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than now and then.
The woman who has laughed at her husband can love him no longer. A man should be to the woman who loves him a being full of force and greatness, and continually imposing. Households cannot last without despotism. Nations, reflect upon it!
A man seldom passes without remorse from the position of confidant to that of rival.
When two women could kill each other, and each sees a poisoned dagger in the other’s hand, they present a picture of harmony which is touching and untroubled until one of them accidentally drops her weapon.
Study is so motherly and good that it is almost a sin to ask of it other rewards than the pure and sweet delights with which it nourishes its children.
We must handle many lamps of Aladdin before we find that the real one is chance, or labor, or genius.
In the life of every woman there is a moment when she understands her destiny, and in which her organization, hitherto dumb, speaks authoritatively. It is not always a man who wakes this sixth and sleeping sense; it may be an unexpected spectacle, a landscape, something she has just read, a religious ceremony, a concert of natural flowers, the caressing notes of a strain of music; in a word, some unexpected movement of the soul or body.