Honore de Balzac

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

"A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea."

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

"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."

"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught."

"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."

"Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless."

"Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established."

"Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart."

"The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute."

"The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin."

"The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband."

"The more one judges, the less one loves."

"The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste."

"There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile."

"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."

"When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich."

"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."

"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."