It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.
— Honore de Balzac
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
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.
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
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.
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.
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.
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
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.
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
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.
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
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.
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
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.
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.
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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.
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
