Honore de Balzac

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

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

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

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

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.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

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

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

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Death unites as well as separates it silences all paltry feeling.

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.

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

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

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

All humanity is passion without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.