Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God.
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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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Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.
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As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.
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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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The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
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All human power is a compound of time and patience.
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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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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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The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.
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The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.
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Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
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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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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.
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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
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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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Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.
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Temperament is the thermometer of character.
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I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
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People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
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The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.
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At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
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It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.