Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.
-
Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
-
If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
-
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
-
A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life.
-
Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.
-
Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.
-
Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
-
Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?
-
True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
-
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
-
Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
-
A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
-
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
-
A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
-
The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.
-
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.
-
Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
-
Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
-
What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.
-
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
-
We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment.
-
Un homme n'a jamais pu e lever sa ma|"tresse jusqu'a' lui; mais une femme place toujours son amant aussi haut qu'elle. A man can never elevate his mistress to his rank, but a woman can always place her lover as high as she.
-
At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.