Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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.
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Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.
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When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
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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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No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.
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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.
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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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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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It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
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Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.
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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.
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Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
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When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she.
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Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
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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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A mother who is really a mother is never free.
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Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.
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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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People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
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The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.
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Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.