Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.
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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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The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
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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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Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.
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All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.
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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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Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.
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A lui la foi, a' elle le doute, a' elle le fardeau le plus lourd: la femme ne souffre-t-elle pas toujours pour deux? For him, faith; for her, doubt and for her theheavier load: does not the woman always suffer for both?
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Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
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Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
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Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.
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A courage which looks easy & yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons - the least rewarded of all forms of courage.
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Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.
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I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
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Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman!
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There is something great and terrible about suicide.
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A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.
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Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.
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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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There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.
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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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Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.