We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
~ Honoré De Balzac
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
Power is action the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
