“It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.”

“O wandering graves! O restless sleep!O silence of the sunless day!O still ravine! O stormy deep!Give up your prey! Give up your prey!”

“Lean on principles, one day they'll end up giving way.”

“There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.”

“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”

“I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.”

“I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.”