“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.”

“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.”

“Passions are less mischievous than boredom for passions tend to diminish and boredom increase.”

“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”

“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.”

“Night, which in Autumn seems to fall from the sky so suddenly, chilled us...”

“Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”

“For with dandies, a joke is the only way of making yourself respected.”

“I did not want to be taken for a fool – the typical French reason for performing the worst of deeds without remorse.”

“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")”