Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
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The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
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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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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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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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Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.
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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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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
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True love rules especially through memory.
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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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Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.
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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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When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army.
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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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I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
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Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.
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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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Authentic love always assumes the mystery of modesty, even in its expression, because actions speak louder than words. Unlike a feigned love, it feels no need to set a conflagration.
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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?
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Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.
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Cruelty and fear shake hands together.