Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.

Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh.

To inspire love is a woman's greatest ambition, believe me. It's the one thing woman care about and there's no woman so proud that she does not rejoice at heart in her conquests.

It is the public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all.

The genuine Amphitryon is the Amphitryon with whom we dine.

Gold makes the ugly beautiful.

If Claret is the king of natural wines, Burgundy is the queen.

Gold gives to the ugliest thing a certain charming air, For that without it were else a miserable affair.

Of all human foibles love of living is the most powerful.

To marry a fool is to be no fool.

There is no fate more distressing for an artist than to have to show himself off before fools, to see his work exposed to the criticism of the vulgar and ignorant.

To find yourself jilted is a blow to your pride. Do your best to forget it and if you don't succeed, at least pretend to.

Ah! how annoying that the law doesn't allow a woman to change husbands just as one does shirts.

An erudite fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool.

The scandal of the world is what makes the offence; it is not sinful to sin in silence.

One ought to look a good deal at oneself before thinking of condemning others.

Frenchmen have an unlimited capacity for gallantry and indulge it on every occasion.

There's a sort of decency among the dead, a remarkable discretion: you never find them making any complaint against the doctor who killed them!

I will not leave you until I have seen you hanged.