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

More from Honore De Balzac

• The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
• The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
• And in the middle of all this, I started to think about the one thing that makes me feel really good and makes immediate sense...and it's you.
• Absence diminishes commonplace passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire.
• Absence is to love as wind to fire; it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
• Absence makes the heart grow fonder: Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!