Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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.
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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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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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There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
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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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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?
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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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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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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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A courage which looks easy & yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons - the least rewarded of all forms of courage.
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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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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 art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
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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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Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
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The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
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The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.
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The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.
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When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
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Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
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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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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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When women love, they forgive everything...