Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.
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Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.
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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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Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
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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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Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
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The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
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Love is the poetry of the senses.
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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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But does not happiness come from the soul within?
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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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My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."
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A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.
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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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All we are is in the soul.
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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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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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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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God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.
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Life is simply what out feelings do to us.