Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman!
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Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
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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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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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All happiness depends on courage and work.
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Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
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When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
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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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Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.
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Sensuality is the death of the soul.
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Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
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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 mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.
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The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.
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Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.
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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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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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Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.
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Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.
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Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.
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Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.
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Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?