Honore De Balzac

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.

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

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

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

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

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

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

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

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.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

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

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

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

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

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

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

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

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

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.