Honore De Balzac Quotes
Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.
One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.
To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.
He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.
Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
Woman is a most charming creature, who changes her heart as easily as she does her gloves.
Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it.
By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.
When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
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.
I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore the ordinary rules of common-sense.
Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.
Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.
All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.
Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.
Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.
L'amour n'est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.
The duration of a couple's passion is in proportion to the woman's original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.
Nos beaux sentiments ne sont-ils pas les poe sies de la volonte ? Aren't our best feelings poetry of the will?
Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another.
There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at the touch of consoling words, that would reveal the depths of our pain.
We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day.
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense.
Nothing can afford a woman greater pleasure than to hear tender words of love. The strictest, most devout woman will listen even if she must not answer.