Category: Philosophy & Ethics
Of all paradoxes man is the cleverest and most untiring. He says he is a worm of the earth, but believes himself to be a son of God; his own person he clothes modestly, but revels in discovering the nakedness of the greatest possible number of his sisters in Christ. The more h...
Of all paradoxes man is the cleverest and most untiring. He says he is a worm of the earth, but believes himself to be a son of God; his own person he clothes modestly, but reve...
2. CHAPTER II.There are two principal ways by which we may arrive at the fatal _yes_, that terrible monosyllable which must decide our happiness or misfortune; that _yes_ which may make for u...
3. CHAPTER III.If a man were only a generating animal, the problem of age in marriage would be very simple, and reducible to this formula: That as long as men or women can relight the flame of...
4. CHAPTER IV.Love is the strongest, the most irresistible, the most fatal of chemical affinities, and if potassium can extract oxygen from water, unite with it, light it, and make it burn wi...
5. part I have under my eyes a young man, the perfection of a man,aristocratic as regards birth, mind, and income, who, indifferent to the sympathies awakened in women at his every step, is completely absorbed in a woman who is hardly feminine...
6. CHAPTER V.Fish, birds, and mammals, when they feel themselves fit for love and wish to win it, develop new organs, new songs, the newest seductions, and with æsthetic or musical fascinati...
7. CHAPTER VI.In this century, in which the voice of the majority takes the place of right and reason, the problem would be solved by that meeting of which I have guaranteed the result.
8. CHAPTER VII.Before breeding time birds build their nests to receive their future young and to protect them from the weather. Many men, more improvident than the birds, marry without knowing...
9. CHAPTER VIII.But even if you have chosen the best of women for your companion, whether it be due to your merit or your good fortune, the great problem of happiness is not yet solved, for the...
10. CHAPTER IX.I am sitting in a restaurant in the town of ————, at the seaside. It is the height of the bathing season, the carnival of salt and fresh water, and the whole world is forgetting...
11. CHAPTER X.But few marriages are a hell, and fewer still enjoy the highest beatitudes of heaven; the most stand halfway between the two—that is, in purgatory. There they live without redem...
12. CHAPTER XI.They had been seated near each other for some time on the same sofa, not in the voluptuous atmosphere of desire, but in a calm and ingenuous admiration of each other.