Honore De Balzac Quotes

No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.

But woman brings disorder into society through passion.

Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.

Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.

Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman.

Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion.

True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!

In a world of hunchbacks, a fine figure becomes a monstrosity.

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.

Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret.

Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?

To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.

At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.

The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.

The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.

Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.

Rich women need not fear old age; their gold can always create about them any feelings necessary to their happiness.

Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.

In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.

Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.

A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste.

Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.

I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.

Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.

The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?

The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.

No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.

A husband and wife who are in the habit of occupying separate rooms are either beings apart, or they have found happiness. Either they hate or they adore each other.

She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.

There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.

You cannot pluck love out of your heart as you would pull a tooth.

Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.

We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment.

Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.

A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed!

Six weeks with a fever is an eternity.

God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the solitary, thoughtful seeker

Novelty is both delightful and deceptive.

Nothing is as heady as the wine of misfortune.

Only when one has learned to acknowledge that wiser minds have made better words to come out of our mouths may we truly, then, begin to speak them.

In France we can cauterize wounds but we do not yet know any remedy for the injuries inflicted by a bon mot.

Behind every fortune there is a crime.

Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.

The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?

A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.

For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.

The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.

Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.

Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.