Quotes from Honore de Balzac

From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.

And thus Bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pygmies, came into the world.

Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart like a viper in its hole.

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

Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.

Marriage must ceaselessly combat a monster that devours everything: habit.

Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.

Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman.

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

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

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

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Marriage must constantly fight against a monster which devours everything: routine.

Our heart is a treasury; if you spend all its wealth at once you are ruined. We find it as difficult to forgive a person for displaying his feeling in all its nakedness as we do to forgive a man for being penniless.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

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.

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

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

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.

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

Power is action the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

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

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.