Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.
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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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A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.
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The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.
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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
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Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
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Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.
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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.
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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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It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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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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Does anyone know where these gondolas of Paris come from? [Fr., Ne sait on pas ou viennent ces gondoles Parisiennes?]
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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.
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I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.
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Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.
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Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
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Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
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One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.
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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
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One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.