Honore de Balzac Quotes
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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.
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Yes, I can understand that a man might go to a gambling table when he sees that all that lies between him and death is his last crown.
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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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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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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
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Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.
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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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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.
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I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
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The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
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Old maids claw as cats do. They not only inflict wounds but experience pleasure in doing so. Nor will they fail to remind their victims of the blood drawn.
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True love rules especially through memory.
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Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
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Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.
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Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal.
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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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Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.
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A woman questions the man who loves exactly as a judge questions a criminal. This being so, a flash of the eye, a mere word, an inflection of the voice or a moment's hesitation suffice to expose the fact, betrayal or crime he is attempting to conceal.
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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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The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.
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Grief ennobles the commonest people because it has its own essential grandeur. To shine with the luster of grief, a person need only be sincere.