Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
The happier a man, the more apt he is to tremble. In hearts exclusively tender, anxiety and jealousy are in exact proportion to happiness.
-
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
-
Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
-
Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.
-
Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
-
Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.
-
Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.
-
Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
-
All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.
-
It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
-
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?
-
There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
-
Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!
-
Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.
-
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
-
A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.
-
Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
-
Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.