The phrase in French is found in Étienne Blanchard (1941), "Recueil d'idées", p. 76: "Quand je m'approche d'un enfant, il m'inspire deux sentiments: la tendresse pour ce qu'il est, et le respect pour ce qu'il peut être un jour." It doesn't give any reference, just like modern books which include the quote in English.
Disputed
“What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?”
Un enfant, monsieur, n'est-il pas l'image de deux êtres, le fruit de deux sentiments librement confondus?
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. II: A Hidden Grief
Original
Un enfant, monsieur, n'est-il pas l'image de deux êtres, le fruit de deux sentiments librement confondus?
A Woman of Thirty (1842)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Honoré de Balzac 157
French writer 1799–1850Related quotes
“The icon and the idol determine two manners of being for beings, not two classes of beings.”
Source: God Without Being (1982), p. 8
Letter to Sir William Jackson Hooker, (1856 or earlier).
Context: The smell of the ripe fruit is certainly at first disagreeable, though less so when it has newly fallen from the tree; for the moment it is ripe it falls of itself, and the only way to eat Durians in perfection is to get them as they fall. It would perhaps not be correct to say that the Durian is the best of all fruits, because it cannot supply the place of subacid juicy fruits such as the orange, grape, mango, and mangosteen, whose refreshing and cooling qualities are so grateful; but as producing a food of the most exquisite flavour it is unsurpassed. If I had to fix on two only as representing the perfection of the two classes, I should certainly choose the Durian and the Orange as the king and queen of fruits.
The Art Eternal, New York Evening Mail (1918)
1910s
Quoted in Rekha: The divine diva, 17 May 2003, 7 December 2013, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/entertai/2003/may/17dinesh.htm,
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (February 4, 2007)
2007, 2008
Science and the Common Understanding (1954); based on 1953 Reith lectures.