Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.
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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.
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Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird.
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She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.
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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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Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
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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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To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.
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To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
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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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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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As a rule, only the poor are generous.
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People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
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A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.
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It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
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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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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.
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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
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Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
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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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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.
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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.