“Hatred needs scorn. Scorn is hatred's nectar!”

“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.”

“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.”

“Men are all the same. Novelty amongst themselves displeases and upsets them – but if the novelty is wearing a skirt, they go crazy for it.(Les hommes sont tous les mêmes. L'étrangeté leur déplaît, d'homme à homme, et les blesse ; mais si l'étrangeté porte des jupes, ils en raffolent.)”

“Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted.”

“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.”