Honore de Balzac

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

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

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

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.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

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?

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

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.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

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

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

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

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

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.

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.

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.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.