Honore de Balzac Quotes
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True love rules especially through memory.
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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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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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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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A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible.
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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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Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
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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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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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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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Le coeur d'une me' re est un ab|"me au fond duquel se trouve toujours un pardon. A mother'sheart isanabyss atthebottomof whichthere is always forgiveness.
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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
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Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.
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When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army.
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Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.
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I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
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Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.
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Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
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Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
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The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.
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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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Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?
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What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?