Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
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The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.
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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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Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l'habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit.
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Woman is a most charming creature, who changes her heart as easily as she does her gloves.
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People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.
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Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
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Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders.
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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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Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.
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Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.
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Conventions are often more cruel than the law.
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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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I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
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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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A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.
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The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.
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But woman brings disorder into society through passion.
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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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They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them.
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There is something great and terrible about suicide.
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On the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts.
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Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.