Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
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When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
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Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.
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The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.
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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
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Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.
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Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
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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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The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.
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Economized love is never real love.
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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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Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.
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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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I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.
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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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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.
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Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
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The duration of a couple's passion is in proportion to the woman's original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.
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When tempted to be unfaithful, the intellectual woman will try to inspire her husband with indifference, the sentimental woman with hatred, and the passionate woman with disgust.
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We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.
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All human power is a compound of time and patience.
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Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.
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A husband can commit no greater blunder than to discuss his wife, if she is virtuous, with his mistress; unless it be to mention his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife.