Honore De Balzac Quotes
Love endows us with a sort of personal religion; we respect another live within ourselves.
My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."
Does not any limit imposed upon one inspire a desire to go beyond it? Does not our keenest suffering arise when our free will is crossed?
Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.
Tradesmen regard an author with a mixed feeling of terror, compassion and curiosity.
Let nothing dupe you! Such is the horrible maxim that acts as a solvent upon every noble feeling man experiences.
When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.
The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.
Materialism and spirituality are two pretty racquets with which charlatans in cap and gown make the same ball fly.
You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.
Thought is the only treasure that God sets outside all power and keeps to serve as a secret link among the unhappy.
How fondly swindlers coddle their dupes! No mother is as caressing or thoughtful towards her adored child as a merchant in hypocrisy toward his milch-cow.
It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.
Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.
There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.
For young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds.
I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
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.
When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.
Le coeur d'une me' re est un ab|"me au fond duquel se trouve toujours un pardon. A mother'sheart isanabyss atthebottomof whichthere is always forgiveness.
Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l'habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit.
Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
Self-love is as protective as the Deity; Disenchantment is as perspicacious as a surgeon; Experience is as provident as a mother. Such are the theologic virtues of marriage.
A woman, even a prude, is not long at a loss, however dire her plight. She would seen always to have in hand the fig leaf our Mother Eve bequeathed to her.
We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing.
No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.
When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.
Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.
Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
There are moments in life when all that we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us our wounds would wince at consoling words that would reveal the depths of our pain.
