Honore de Balzac Quotes
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I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
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Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
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An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.
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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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When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.
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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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Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.
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To lese-majeste and contempt of court, we must add the crime of lese-million, that fearful indignity we visit on the rich when we expose the impotence of gold.
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But woman brings disorder into society through passion.
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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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The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.
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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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We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.
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Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
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Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right.
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The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical.
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We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
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Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.
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Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.
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The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?
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Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.