Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
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.
-
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
-
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.
-
L'amour n'est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.
-
There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
-
Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!
-
Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.
-
The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.
-
It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
-
Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.
-
The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.
-
Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.
-
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
-
A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.
-
Only when one has learned to acknowledge that wiser minds have made better words to come out of our mouths may we truly, then, begin to speak them.
-
Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.
-
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
-
Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
-
A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.
-
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
-
Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.
-
Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
-
True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
-
The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.