Honore De Balzac

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

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

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

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.

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.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

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 habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

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

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

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

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.