Honore de Balzac Quotes
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The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
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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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It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.
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Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.
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Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.
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To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
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Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
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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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I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
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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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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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A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.
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One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.
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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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The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.
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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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Conventions are often more cruel than the law.
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The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share.
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With monuments as with men, position means everything.
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Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.
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There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
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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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In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.
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At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.