Honore de Balzac Quotes

One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.

Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.

In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is a man, a father, a mother and a woman.

Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.

Old maids claw as cats do. They not only inflict wounds but experience pleasure in doing so. Nor will they fail to remind their victims of the blood drawn.

Ah! the soft starlight of virgin eyes.

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

Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird.

Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.

Handsome widows, after a twelve-month, enjoy a latitude and longitude without limit.

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.

Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.

Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.

The great secret of social alchemy is to profit best from each stage in our lives, to gather all its leaves in spring, all its flowers in summer, and all its fruits in autumn.

Though your vulgarian does not readily admit that feelings can change overnight, certainly two lovers often part far more abruptly than they came together.

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become like women; their thoughts can revolve around the minor facts of life and penetrate their hidden meaning.

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

In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

For a sick man the world begins at his pillow and ends at the foot of his bed.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

Life is simply what out feelings do to us.

A courage which looks easy & yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons - the least rewarded of all forms of courage.

Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.

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.

During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo.

A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.

The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

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

One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.

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

The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.

Woman is a most charming creature, who changes her heart as easily as she does her gloves.

A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.

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.

When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.

Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.

We love because we love.

Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.

Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.

Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.

Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.