Honore de Balzac

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

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

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

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

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

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