Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
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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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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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Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.
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The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.
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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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Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
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Cruelty and fear shake hands together.
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Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
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A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.
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All we are is in the soul.
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Loyalty in time of need is possibly one of the noblest of victories a courtier can win over himself.
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With a woman, always make good use of a secret. She will be proportionally grateful to you, like a scoundrel who grants his respect to an honest man he has been unable to swindle.
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For the person who loves God, worship is the daily bread of patience.
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At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan.
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My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."
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Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman.
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He who best knows the world will love it least.
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Virtue is always too much of a piece and too ignorant of those shades of feeling and of temperament that enable us to squint when we are placed in a false position.
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Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge.
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Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance.
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Love is the poetry of the senses.
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God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.
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But does not happiness come from the soul within?