Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is a man, a father, a mother and a woman.
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The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true.
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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.
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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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Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God.
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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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Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.
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Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
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The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
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Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.
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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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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 jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.
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No frozen-hearted woman ever I laid eyes on but has made duty her religion.
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A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.
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Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
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Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights.
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Cruelty and fear shake hands together.
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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
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No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.
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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.
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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.