Honore de Balzac Quotes
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At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
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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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Sensuality is the death of the soul.
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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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The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.
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A mother who is really a mother is never free.
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To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
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There is nothing original; all is reflected light.
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L'amour n'est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.
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I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
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The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
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Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.
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A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
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Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.
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Only when one has learned to acknowledge that wiser minds have made better words to come out of our mouths may we truly, then, begin to speak them.
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To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.
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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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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.
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It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
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Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.
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The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.
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To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
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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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Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.