Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.
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I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
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A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.
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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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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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Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing.
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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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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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There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.
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There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
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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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Economized love is never real love.
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The happier a man, the more apt he is to tremble. In hearts exclusively tender, anxiety and jealousy are in exact proportion to happiness.
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Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
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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?
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Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.
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Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
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I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.
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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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Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.
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Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.