Honore de Balzac Quotes

If certain women walk straight into adultery, there are many others who cling to numerous hopes, and commit sin only after wandering through a maze of sorrows.

Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.

Materialism and spirituality are two pretty racquets with which charlatans in cap and gown make the same ball fly.

Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted.

The woman you buy takes a great deal of money. The woman who gives herself to you takes all your money.

For avarice begins where poverty ends.

To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

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

The more you judge, the less you love.

Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!

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.

By resorting to self-resignation, the unfortunate consummate.

Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.

The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.

To man, faith; to woman, doubt. She bears the heavier burden. Does not woman invariably suffer for two?

Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.

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.

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

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.

A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.

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.

When women love, they forgive everything...

Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.

In painting, you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no-one can deal with it.

Like evil, sublimity is also contagious.

Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.

A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.

Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.

No frozen-hearted woman ever I laid eyes on but has made duty her religion.

Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

Sensuality is the death of the soul.

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.

Behind every fortune there is a crime.

Temperament is the thermometer of character.

Man is no match for woman where mischief reigns.

Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.

A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent.

Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.

The union of a want and a sentiment.

When she lives at his palace, the maiden niece of a bishop can pass for a respectable woman because, if she has a love affair, she is obliged to hoodwink her uncle.