Honore de Balzac Quotes
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The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule.
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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.
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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
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When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.
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The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.
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The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
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People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
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Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.
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Authentic love always assumes the mystery of modesty, even in its expression, because actions speak louder than words. Unlike a feigned love, it feels no need to set a conflagration.
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The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.
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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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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 passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
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As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.
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Temperament is the thermometer of character.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
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I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
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When women love, they forgive everything...