choose and leave you in it defenceless and
lonely as old Lear. To put your heart into life is the most fatal of
errors; it is to give a hostage to your enemies whom you can only ransom
at the price of your ruin. But what is the use of talking? To you, life
will be always Alastor and Epipsychidion, and to us, it will always be a
Treatise on Whist. That's all!"

"A Treatise on Whist! No! It is something much worse. It is a Book of
the Bastile, with all entered as criminal in it, who cannot be bought
off by bribe or intrigue, by a rogue's stratagem or a courtesan's vice!"

"The world is only a big Harpagon, and you and such as you are Maitre
Jacques. '_Puisque vous l'avez voulu!_' you say,--and call him frankly
to his face, '_Avare, ladre, vilain, fessemathieu!_' and Harpagon
answers you with a big stick and cries, '_Apprenez a parler!_' Poor
Maitre Jacques! I never read of him without thinking what a type he is
of Genius. No offence to you, my dear. He'd the wit to see he would
never be pardoned for telling the truth, and yet he told it! The perfect
type of Genius."

* * *

The untruthfulness of women communicates itself to the man whose chief
society they form, and the perpetual necessities of intrigue end in
corrupting the temper whose chief pursuit is passion.

Women who environ a man's fidelity by ceaseless suspicion and exaction,
create the evil that they dread.

* * *

Society, after all, asks very little. Society only asks you to wash the
outside of your cup and platter: inside you may keep any kind of
nastiness that you like: only wash the outside. Do wash the outside,
says Society; and it would be a churl or an ass indeed who would refuse
so small a request.

* * *

A woman who is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man than the woman who
is fire to his ice. There is hope for him in the one, but only a dreary
despair in the other. The ardours that intoxicate him in the first
summer of his passion serve but to dull and chill him in the later time.

* * *

A frog that dwelt in a ditch spat at a worm that bore a lamp.

"Why do you do that?" said the glow-worm.

"Why do you shine?" said the frog.

* * *

When a name is in the public mouth the public nostril likes to smell a
foulness in it. It likes to think that Byron committed incest; that
Milton was a brute; that Raffaelle's vices killed him; that Pascal