Honore de Balzac Quotes
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They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them.
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A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.
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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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Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
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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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In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is a man, a father, a mother and a woman.
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The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.
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Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman!
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Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.
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No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
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Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.
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Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.
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The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
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Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
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Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
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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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Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
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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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A husband and wife who are in the habit of occupying separate rooms are either beings apart, or they have found happiness. Either they hate or they adore each other.
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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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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
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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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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.