Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
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The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.
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In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is a man, a father, a mother and a woman.
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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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Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!
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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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A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.
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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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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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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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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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To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.
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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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Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
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When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
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By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.
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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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Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights.
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Does anyone know where these gondolas of Paris come from? [Fr., Ne sait on pas ou viennent ces gondoles Parisiennes?]
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Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
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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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Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
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There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.