The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study.
As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative.
When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
Grief ennobles the commonest people because it has its own essential grandeur. To shine with the luster of grief, a person need only be sincere.
What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.
And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.
It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.
For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life.
In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is.
It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
Heaven should be kind to stupid people, for no one else can be consistently.
People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.
If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.
Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them.
For young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds.
Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke.
Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.