Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Economized love is never real love.
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Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.
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Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.
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Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!
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The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
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There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.
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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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It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
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Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
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Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.
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Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
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The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.
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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
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Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.
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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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I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
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Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.
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Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.
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Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.
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I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.
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Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.
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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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There is nothing original; all is reflected light.
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The future of a nation lies in the hands of mothers.