Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
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A mother who is really a mother is never free.
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Temperament is the thermometer of character.
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A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.
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A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.
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The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
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Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
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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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Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.
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Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.
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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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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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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
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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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No frozen-hearted woman ever I laid eyes on but has made duty her religion.
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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
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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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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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The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true.
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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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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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People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
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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.