Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues.
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Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
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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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Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.
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People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.
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Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.
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Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.
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Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
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Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.
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Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.
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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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Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
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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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In Paris, the greatest expression of personal satisfaction known to man is the smirk on the face of a male, highly pleased with himself as he leaves the boudoir of a lady.
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A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
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The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.
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All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
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The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
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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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Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.
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The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.
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There is something great and terrible about suicide.
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Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.
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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.