Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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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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Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
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Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
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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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Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
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Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.
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Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.
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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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Loyalty in time of need is possibly one of the noblest of victories a courtier can win over himself.
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He who best knows the world will love it least.
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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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My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."
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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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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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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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Love is the poetry of the senses.
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For the person who loves God, worship is the daily bread of patience.
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Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance.
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When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?
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But does not happiness come from the soul within?
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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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A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.