Honore de Balzac Children Quotations

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

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

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

The election of a deputy to the Legislature offers a noble and majestic spectacle comparable only to the delivery of a child. It involves the same efforts, the same impurities, the same laceration, and the same triumph.

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.

Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.

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.

Ah! how much a mother learns from her child! The constant protection of a helpless being forces us to so strict an alliance with virtue, that a woman never shows to full advantage except as a mother. Then alone can her character expand in the fulfillment of all life's duties and the enjoyment of all its pleasures.

A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible.

How fondly swindlers coddle their dupes! No mother is as caressing or thoughtful towards her adored child as a merchant in hypocrisy toward his milch-cow.