Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.
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There is nothing original; all is reflected light.
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Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.
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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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Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.
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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 art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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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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Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.
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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.
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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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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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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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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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The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
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The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.
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When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.
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Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
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The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.