Honoré de Balzac

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Equality may be aright, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?

When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate.

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

It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.

Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?

Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.