Our poor bodies have strength and resources that we learn to know only when we are in the gravest situations. - André Maurois

There is not one who speaks of us in our presence as he does in our absence, wrote Pascal. All affection is based on this mutual deception, and few friendships would survive if we knew what our friends were saying of us behind our backs.

We are always repeating ancestral signs which are quite useless now. When a great actress wants to express hate she draws back her charming lips and shows her canine teeth, an unconscious sign of cannibalism. We shake hands with a friend to prevent him using it to strike us, and we take off our hats because our ancestors used to humbly offer their heads, to the bigwigs of those days, to be cut off.

An unsatisfied woman requires luxury, but a woman who is in love with a man will lie on a board.