Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Honore de Balzac
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
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.
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
The more one judges, the less one loves.
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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 is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
Love is the poetry of the senses.
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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.
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
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.
The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
What is art? Nature concentrated.
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
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.
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
