Honore de Balzac

“Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.”

“There is something great and terrible about suicide.”

“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.”

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

“When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.”

“We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.”

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

“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”

“A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.”

“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.”

“Love is the poetry of the senses.”

“Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.”

“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.”

“Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.”

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

“The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”

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

“Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“A mother who is really a mother is never free.”