50 Quotes From Honore de Balzac

1. A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
2. 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.
3. The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
4. The more one judges, the less one loves.
5. A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
6. There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
7. The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
8. Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
9. Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
10. In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
11. Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
12. 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.
13. A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
14. Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
15. Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
16. Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.
17. There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
18. The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
19. The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
20. A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
21. First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
22. Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
23. 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.
24. No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
25. Love is the poetry of the senses.
26. Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
27. It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
28. A mother who is really a mother is never free.
29. Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
30. A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
31. Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
32. One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
33. The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
34. For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
35. If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
36. 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.
37. Love is a game in which one always cheats.
38. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
39. We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
40. Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
41. It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
42. 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.
43. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
44. Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
45. Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
46. 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.
47. The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
48. A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
49. A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
50. The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.