Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights.
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Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.
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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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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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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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True love rules especially through memory.
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When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army.
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Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
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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 perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
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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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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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Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.
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Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.
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I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
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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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Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.
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Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.
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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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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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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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Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
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No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.
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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.