Honore de Balzac

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

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

What is art? Nature concentrated.

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

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

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.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

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