Honore de Balzac

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.”

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

“A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.”

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

“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.”

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

“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 t...”

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

“Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.”

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

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

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

“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”

“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.”