Honore De Balzac Quotes
Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
Loyalty in time of need is possibly one of the noblest of victories a courtier can win over himself.
In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted.
France is a country that loves to change their government if it is always the same.
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.
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.
The man whom fate employs to awaken love in the heart of a young girl is often unaware of his work and therefore leaves it uncompleted.
Kindness steers no easy course. Attributing it to character, we seldom recognize the secret efforts of a noble heart, whereas we reward really wicked people for the evil they refrain from committing.
True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe's conceit.
Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
Our most natural feelings are those we are loath to confess, and fatuity is among them.
All men can bear a familiar, definite misfortune better than the cruel alternations of a fate which, from one moment to another, brings excessive joy or sorrow.
Once she has committed sin, there is nothing left for the Protestant woman, whereas the Catholic Church, hope of forgiveness makes a woman sublime.
Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.
Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!
A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur.
The innocence of virgins is like milk which turns when exposed to a clap of thunder, to a tart smell, to a hot day, to the merest nothing.
Journalists grow accustomed to seeing evil and they let it pass; they proceed to approve it, and they end by committing it themselves.
I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me . . . to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.
The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical.
To man, faith; to woman, doubt. She bears the heavier burden. Does not woman invariably suffer for two?
An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.
Grief ennobles the commonest people because it has its own essential grandeur. To shine with the luster of grief, a person need only be sincere.
Women themselves are so happy, and so beautiful, when they're strong, that they naturally choose powerful men, even if that power's so enermous there's a real risk it could shatter them.
It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.
In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is.
Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.