Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
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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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One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.
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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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True love rules especially through memory.
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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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Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
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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.
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Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.
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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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I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
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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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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.