Top 676 Quotes & Sayings by Honore de Balzac - Page 9

A husband can commit no greater blunder than to discuss his wife, if she is virtuous, with his mistress; unless it be to mention his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife.

For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life.

Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has!

A lui la foi, a' elle le doute, a' elle le fardeau le plus lourd: la femme ne souffre-t-elle pas toujours pour deux? For him, faith; for her, doubt and for her theheavier load: does not the woman always suffer for both?

We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.

Necessity is the spur of genius.

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.

One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.

France is a country that loves to change their government if it is always the same.

Heaven should be kind to stupid people, for no one else can be consistently.

How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene. 'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.' 'And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer.

Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.

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

Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.

Remorse is impotent; it will repeat its faults. Repentance only is a true force; it puts an end to everything.

Thought is the only treasure that God sets outside all power and keeps to serve as a secret link among the unhappy.

In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted.

Yes, I can understand that a man might go to a gambling table when he sees that all that lies between him and death is his last crown.

How fondly swindlers coddle their dupes! No mother is as caressing or thoughtful towards her adored child as a merchant in hypocrisy toward his milch-cow.

Reading brings us unknown friends

A vocation is born to us all; happily most of us meet promptly our twin,--occupation.

Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.

One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.

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

Like evil, sublimity is also contagious.

Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.

Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?

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

Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.

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.

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

The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true

The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.

What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.

A sick man, surrounded by those who love him, nursed by those who wish earnestly that he should live, will recover (all other things being equal), when another patient tended by hirelings will die. Doctors decline to see unconscious magnestism in this phenomenon; for them it is the result of intelligent nursing, of exact obedience to their orders; but many a mother knows the virtue of such ardent projections of strong, unceasing prayer.

Economized love is never real love.

It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.

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.

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

The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.

Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues.

Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.

Glory is the sunshine of the dead

A man's own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe.

Conventions are often more cruel than the law.

Pure herring oil is the port wine of English cats

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.

If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance.

Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys.

They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them.

Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.

My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.

A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible.

Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.

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.

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

No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.

Our souls possess the unknown power of extending as well as contracting space.