Honore de Balzac

“Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”

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

“The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.”

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

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

“Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.”

“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.”

“It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Finance, like time, devours its own children.”