Honore de Balzac

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

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

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

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

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

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

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

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

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.