Honore de Balzac Quotes
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When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
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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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A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.
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Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.
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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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To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.
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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
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The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.
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Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
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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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I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.
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A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.
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No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.
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Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
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Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.
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Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
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It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
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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.
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Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
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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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Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks.