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Quotes from Letters of Two Brides — Honoré de Balzac

1799–1850 France

← All quotes by Honoré de Balzac

21 quotes

The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

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.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

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

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

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

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

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

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

A mother, who is really a mother, is never free.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

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

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

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

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

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

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

A mother’s life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

A husband who submits to his wife’s yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman’s influence ought to be entirely concealed.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

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.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Honoré de Balzac (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.