Honore De Balzac quotes

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

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.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

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.

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

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.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

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.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.