Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
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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!
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Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
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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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The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.
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Sensuality is the death of the soul.
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Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
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There is nothing original; all is reflected light.
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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.
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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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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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Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
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The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
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Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.
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Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
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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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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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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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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
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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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The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.
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Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues.