Honore de Balzac Quotes
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A knowledge of mankind and of things that surround us gives us that second education which proves far move valuable than our first because it alone turns out a truly accomplished man.
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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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When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she.
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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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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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A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.
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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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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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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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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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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 the poetry of the senses.
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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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No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.
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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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But does not happiness come from the soul within?
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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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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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A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.
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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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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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If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.