Honore de Balzac Quotes
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People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
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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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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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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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I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
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When tempted to be unfaithful, the intellectual woman will try to inspire her husband with indifference, the sentimental woman with hatred, and the passionate woman with disgust.
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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
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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.
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When women love, they forgive everything...
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All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.
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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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No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
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Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights.
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Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.
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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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Temperament is the thermometer of character.
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Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.
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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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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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No frozen-hearted woman ever I laid eyes on but has made duty her religion.
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Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.
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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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Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.
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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.