Honore de Balzac
Finance, like time, devours its own children.Collection: Finance
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.Collection: Morning
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.Collection: Art
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.Collection: Dating
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.Collection: Relationship
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.Collection: Wedding
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.Collection: Religion
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.Collection: Women
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.Collection: Anniversary
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.Collection: Mothers
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.Collection: Happiness
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.Collection: Marriage
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.Collection: Great
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.Collection: Legal
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.Collection: Wisdom
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.Collection: Power
What is art? Nature concentrated.Collection: Nature
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.Collection: Marriage
The more one judges, the less one loves.Collection: Love
Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.Collection: Respect
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.Collection: Positive
Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.Collection: Power
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.Collection: Love
Love is the poetry of the senses.Collection: Love
A mother who is really a mother is never free.Collection: Parenting
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.Collection: Women
It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.Collection: Music
The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.Collection: Love
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.Collection: Finance
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.Collection: Equality
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.Collection: Friendship
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.Collection: Smile
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.Collection: Power
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.Collection: Mom
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.Collection: Mom
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.Collection: Wisdom
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.Collection: Love
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.Collection: Intelligence
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.Collection: Death
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.Collection: Nature
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.Collection: Equality
True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.Collection: Love
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.Collection: Mom
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.Collection: Religion
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.