Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.
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Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights.
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People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
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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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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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Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
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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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No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.
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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
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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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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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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
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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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Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
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With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.
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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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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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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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Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
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Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
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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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The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.
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I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.