A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
Honore de Balzac

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.
Honore de Balzac

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

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

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
Honore de Balzac

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.
Honore de Balzac

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.
Honore de Balzac

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Honore de Balzac

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

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

Love is the poetry of the senses.
Honore de Balzac

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
Honore de Balzac

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

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
Honore de Balzac

The more one judges, the less one loves.
Honore de Balzac

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
Honore de Balzac

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
Honore de Balzac

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
Honore de Balzac

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.
Honore de Balzac

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
Honore de Balzac

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
Honore de Balzac

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

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
Honore de Balzac

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.
Honore de Balzac

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Honore de Balzac

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
Honore de Balzac