Honore de Balzac Quotes
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The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
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To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions.
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Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion.
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The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
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A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
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The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.
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Conventions are often more cruel than the law.
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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.
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As a rule, only the poor are generous.
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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.
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The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.
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She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.
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At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
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I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
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Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
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There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
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A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
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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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Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.
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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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Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.
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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.