Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share.
-
Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.
-
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.
-
Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman!
-
Rich women need not fear old age; their gold can always create about them any feelings necessary to their happiness.
-
When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
-
Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.
-
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.
-
The duration of a couple's passion is in proportion to the woman's original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.
-
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
-
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.
-
It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.
-
I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
-
When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.
-
Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.
-
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
-
Economized love is never real love.
-
The future of a nation lies in the hands of mothers.
-
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.
-
Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.
-
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
-
Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
-
Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.
-
Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!