Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.
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There is nothing original; all is reflected light.
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At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
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Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
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Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
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A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.
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It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.
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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.
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The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share.
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Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
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One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.
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It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.
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A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
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Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes.
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Rich women need not fear old age; their gold can always create about them any feelings necessary to their happiness.
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One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
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Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.
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Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.
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There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.
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Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.
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The first thing necessary to win the heart of a woman is opportunity.
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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.
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Reading brings us unknown friends.
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Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.