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Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy. -- Honore De Balzac
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness -- Honore De Balzac
Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it. -- Honore De Balzac
When women love us they forgive everything. -- Honore De Balzac
The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth. -- Honore De Balzac
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea. -- Honore De Balzac
The more a man judges, the less he loves -- Honore De Balzac
The duration of a couple's passion is in proportion to the woman's original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness. -- Honore De Balzac
He who best knows the world will love it least. -- Honore De Balzac
There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy. -- Honore De Balzac
I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree. -- Honore De Balzac
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling. -- Honore De Balzac
To man, faith; to woman, doubt. She bears the heavier burden. Does not woman invariably suffer for two? -- Honore De Balzac
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are. -- Honore De Balzac
Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world
the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion? -- Honore De Balzac
Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established. -- Honore De Balzac
The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius. -- Honore De Balzac
Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another. -- Honore De Balzac
A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one. -- Honore De Balzac
When tempted to be unfaithful, the intellectual woman will try to inspire her husband with indifference, the sentimental woman with hatred, and the passionate woman with disgust. -- Honore De Balzac
When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm. -- Honore De Balzac
Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will. -- Honore De Balzac
Passion is univeral humanity. Without it religion history art and romance would be useless. -- Honore De Balzac
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 enjoyment have been intellectual joys. -- Honore De Balzac
Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge. -- Honore De Balzac
One exits with one's husband
one lives with one's lover. -- Honore De Balzac
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love. -- Honore De Balzac
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence. -- Honore De Balzac
All happiness depends on courage and work. -- Honore De Balzac
The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule. -- Honore De Balzac
In Paris, the greatest expression of personal satisfaction known to man is the smirk on the face of a male, highly pleased with himself as he leaves the boudoir of a lady. -- Honore De Balzac
If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down. -- Honore De Balzac
Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started. -- Honore De Balzac
The viscountess had raised the forefinger of her right hand and made a pretty gesture toward a stool at her feet. There was such intense tyrannical passion in the gesture that the marquis relinquished the doorknob and came back. -- Honore De Balzac
But woman brings disorder into society through passion. -- Honore De Balzac
The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption. -- Honore De Balzac
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves! -- Honore De Balzac
When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses. -- Honore De Balzac
For businessmen, the world is a bale of banknotes in circulation; for most young men, it is a woman; for some women, it is a man; and for others it may be a salon, a coterie, a part of town or a whole city. -- Honore De Balzac
Woman is a most charming creature, who changes her heart as easily as she does her gloves. -- Honore De Balzac
What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible. -- Honore De Balzac
No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness. -- Honore De Balzac
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty. -- Honore De Balzac
A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once. -- Honore De Balzac
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? -- Honore De Balzac
In a husband there is only a man; in a married woman there is a man, a father, and mother, and a woman. -- Honore De Balzac
From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts. -- Honore De Balzac
A woman, even a prude, is not long at a loss, however dire her plight. She would seen always to have in hand the fig leaf our Mother Eve bequeathed to her. -- Honore De Balzac
It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music. -- Honore De Balzac
Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire. -- Honore De Balzac
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment. -- Honore De Balzac
It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role. -- Honore De Balzac
Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her. -- Honore De Balzac
No frozen-hearted woman ever I laid eyes on but has made duty her religion. -- Honore De Balzac
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman. -- Honore De Balzac
Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her. -- Honore De Balzac
In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him. -- Honore De Balzac
To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman. -- Honore De Balzac
A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders. -- Honore De Balzac
Some sentiment other than love united these two beings, and inspired with mutual anxiety their movements and their thoughts. Misery is, perhaps, the most powerful of all ties. -- Honore De Balzac
Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred. -- Honore De Balzac
Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons. -- Honore De Balzac
Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes. -- Honore De Balzac
It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
There's nothing so fearsome as the revolt of a sheep, said de Marsay. -- Honore De Balzac
I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man's improvement in himself. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her. -- Honore De Balzac
Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them. -- Honore De Balzac
...a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack, eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours. I should be like everyone else. And that's what they call living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again.... I am hungry and nothing is offered to appease my appetite. -- Honore De Balzac
An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities. -- Honore De Balzac
A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed. -- Honore De Balzac
With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite. -- Honore De Balzac
We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men. -- Honore De Balzac
He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things. -- Honore De Balzac
A man's own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe. -- Honore De Balzac
It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it. -- Honore De Balzac
The widow employed her woman's malice to devise a system of covert persecution. -- Honore De Balzac
No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover. -- Honore De Balzac
Gratitude is a fool's word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man. -- Honore De Balzac
There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
The words came from him like a sob, a hoarse sound like the death rattle of a dying man; it seemed indeed like the agony of death when the father's love was powerless. -- Honore De Balzac
Pity is woman's sweetest charm. -- Honore De Balzac
Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,
she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth. -- Honore De Balzac
A woman questions the man who loves exactly as a judge questions a criminal. This being so, a flash of the eye, a mere word, an inflection of the voice or a moment's hesitation suffice to expose the fact, betrayal or crime he is attempting to conceal. -- Honore De Balzac
Parent may hinder their children's marriage; but children cannot interfere with the insane acts of their parents in their second childhood. -- Honore De Balzac
Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own. -- Honore De Balzac
Yet, if you have a heart, lock it carefully away like a treasure; do not let any one suspect it, or you will be lost; you would cease to be the executioner, you would take the victim's place. -- Honore De Balzac
Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face. -- Honore De Balzac
Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man. -- Honore De Balzac
It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination. -- Honore De Balzac
A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart. -- Honore De Balzac
If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history. -- Honore De Balzac
If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible. -- Honore De Balzac
In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke. -- Honore De Balzac
Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man's appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table. -- Honore De Balzac
A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other. -- Honore De Balzac
Yes, I can understand that a man might go to gambling table - when he sees that all that lies between himself and death is his last crown -- Honore De Balzac
A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die. -- Honore De Balzac
Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
He will show you how, during the springtime of life, illusions, innocent hopes, silver threads of gossamer, descend from heaven and return there without ever touching the earth. -- Honore De Balzac
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught. -- Honore De Balzac
Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness. -- Honore De Balzac
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love. -- Honore De Balzac
We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day. -- Honore De Balzac
All human beings go through a previous life ... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds? -- Honore De Balzac
Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything. -- Honore De Balzac
Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word. -- Honore De Balzac
A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it. -- Honore De Balzac
Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance. -- Honore De Balzac
Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature. -- Honore De Balzac
The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy. -- Honore De Balzac
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories. -- Honore De Balzac
The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool. -- Honore De Balzac
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
I'd need rest to refresh my brain, and to get rest it's necessary to travel, and to travel one must have money, and in order to get money you have to work ... I am in a vicious circle ... from which it is impossible to escape. -- Honore De Balzac
True love is eternal, infinite and always like itself. It's always equal and pure. Without violent demonstrations: It is seen with white hairs and is always young at heart. -- Honore De Balzac
who had not felt his daughter's heart beat against his breast for ten years, "do you want me to die of joy? -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain. -- Honore De Balzac
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness. -- Honore De Balzac
When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen. -- Honore De Balzac
Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Remorse is impotent; it will repeat its faults. Repentance only is a true force; it puts an end to everything. -- Honore De Balzac
Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things. -- Honore De Balzac
Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation. -- Honore De Balzac
Plenty of things in life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select from realities those which contain the possibility of poetry -- Honore De Balzac
Nothing about me surprises me. -- Honore De Balzac
Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter. -- Honore De Balzac
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning. -- Honore De Balzac
Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception? -- Honore De Balzac
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity? -- Honore De Balzac
A married woman is a slave whom one must put on a throne. -- Honore De Balzac
When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned. -- Honore De Balzac
A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons. -- Honore De Balzac
When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt. -- Honore De Balzac
Do you know what is the hardest thing in life? To make a choice. -- Honore De Balzac
As a rule, only the poor are generous. -- Honore De Balzac
Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters. -- Honore De Balzac
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it. -- Honore De Balzac
One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
The prodigality of millionaires is comparable only to their greed of gain. Let some whim or passion seize them and money is of no account. In fact these Croesuses find whims and passions harder to come by than gold. -- Honore De Balzac
I had youth, beauty, two advantages conferred by chance, and of which we are as proud as if they were hard-won. -- Honore De Balzac
Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of pleasure. -- Honore De Balzac
There will be nothing you may not aspire to; you will go everywhere, and you will find out what the world is - an assemblage of fools and knaves. -- Honore De Balzac
A man like you is a god, not just a machine covered with skin, but a theater where fine feelings sprout and grow-and feelings are all that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Is a feeling anything but an entire world poured into a thought? -- Honore De Balzac
Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking; love has found. -- Honore De Balzac
The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations. -- Honore De Balzac
Inspiration is the opportunity of genius. -- Honore De Balzac
Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts. -- Honore De Balzac
Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights. -- Honore De Balzac
Life is a business transaction. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike. -- Honore De Balzac
A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne. -- Honore De Balzac
Too great a display of delicacy can and does sometimes infringe upon de-cency. -- Honore De Balzac
A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage. -- Honore De Balzac
The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo. -- Honore De Balzac
At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise. -- Honore De Balzac
Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude. -- Honore De Balzac
When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more? -- Honore De Balzac
Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist. -- Honore De Balzac
A mother who is really a mother is never free. -- Honore De Balzac
Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time. -- Honore De Balzac
What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
The woman you buy takes a great deal of money. The woman who gives herself to you takes all your money. -- Honore De Balzac
With a woman, always make good use of a secret. She will be proportionally grateful to you, like a scoundrel who grants his respect to an honest man he has been unable to swindle. -- Honore De Balzac
Coffee falls into the stomach ... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop ... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink ... -- Honore De Balzac
In order not to make him a fixed idea, a regret, a struggle, - three things which poison life. -- Honore De Balzac
There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events. -- Honore De Balzac
The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine. -- Honore De Balzac
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life. -- Honore De Balzac
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman. -- Honore De Balzac
To walk is to vegetate,
to stroll is to live. -- Honore De Balzac
The faint hints of color in her complexion, her tawny blond hair, her extraordinary thinness, all spoke of that unearthly grace modern poets find in the medieval statues. Had she been happy, she'd have been ravishing: happiness constitutes pure poetry, for women. -- Honore De Balzac
The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man. -- Honore De Balzac
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way. -- Honore De Balzac
True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love! -- Honore De Balzac
Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps. -- Honore De Balzac
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society? -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
So, my dear fellow, if I don't believe in God, I believe still less in man. -- Honore De Balzac
If ye were of this world the world would love you, but I have chosen you out of the world; be ye therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. -- Honore De Balzac
Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects. -- Honore De Balzac
But does not happiness come from the soul within? -- Honore De Balzac
On the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts. -- Honore De Balzac
Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation. -- Honore De Balzac
In smart society men are jealous of one another after the fashion of women. -- Honore De Balzac
We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience -- Honore De Balzac
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood! -- Honore De Balzac
Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief. -- Honore De Balzac
Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life, seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the midst of those domains of fancy, where the soul loves to give full rein to its wild creations. -- Honore De Balzac
A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve. -- Honore De Balzac
The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool. -- Honore De Balzac
Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God. -- Honore De Balzac
Fathers must always be giving if they would be happy themselves; always giving - they would not be fathers else. -- Honore De Balzac
In France we can cauterize wounds but we do not yet know any remedy for the injuries inflicted by a bon mot. -- Honore De Balzac
There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances. -- Honore De Balzac
For young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds. -- Honore De Balzac
The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends. -- Honore De Balzac
The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred. -- Honore De Balzac
Clouds signify the veil of the Most High. -- Honore De Balzac
Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from. -- Honore De Balzac
Conscience, my dear, is a kind of stick that everyone picks up to thrash his neighbor with, but one he never uses against himself. -- Honore De Balzac
For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop. -- Honore De Balzac
Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance. -- Honore De Balzac
To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh. -- Honore De Balzac
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin. -- Honore De Balzac
Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual. -- Honore De Balzac
Handsome widows, after a twelve-month, enjoy a latitude and longitude without limit. -- Honore De Balzac
A careful observation of Nature will disclose pleasantries of superb irony. She has for instance placed toads close to flowers. -- Honore De Balzac
Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole. -- Honore De Balzac
The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Heaven should be kind to stupid people, for no one else can be consistently. -- Honore De Balzac
It is absurd to pretend that one cannot love the same woman always, as to pretend that a good artist needs several violins to execute a piece of music. -- Honore De Balzac
Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls? -- Honore De Balzac
Vulgar souls look hastily and superficially at the sea and accuse it of monotony; other more privileged beings could spend a lifetime admiring it and discovering new and changing phenomena that delight them. So it is with love. -- Honore De Balzac
Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it. -- Honore De Balzac
All human power is a compound of time and patience. -- Honore De Balzac
No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea. -- Honore De Balzac
The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us. -- Honore De Balzac
Life cannot go on without much forgetting. -- Honore De Balzac
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow. -- Honore De Balzac
Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy. -- Honore De Balzac
By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions. -- Honore De Balzac
Instead of inspiring the gallant attentions which other women seek, she made men dream, -- Honore De Balzac
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite. -- Honore De Balzac
A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings. -- Honore De Balzac
Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case. -- Honore De Balzac
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one. -- Honore De Balzac
Pure herring oil is the port wine of English cats -- Honore De Balzac
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother! -- Honore De Balzac
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? -- Honore De Balzac
So he immolated himself. He made the sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary exile. His daughters were satisfied, so he thought that he had done the best thing he could; but it was a family crime, and father and daughters were accomplices. -- Honore De Balzac
Economized love is never real love. -- Honore De Balzac
The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others
existences which the spirit alone remembers, for matter has no memory for spiritual things. -- Honore De Balzac
Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature. -- Honore De Balzac
Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating. -- Honore De Balzac
Necessity is the spur of genius. -- Honore De Balzac
Resignation is a daily suicide. -- Honore De Balzac
Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. -- Honore De Balzac
The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again. -- Honore De Balzac
Our Father in heaven is surely on the side of fathers on earth who love their children. -- Honore De Balzac
Necessity is often the spur to genius. -- Honore De Balzac
To lese-majeste and contempt of court, we must add the crime of lese-million, that fearful indignity we visit on the rich when we expose the impotence of gold. -- Honore De Balzac
Does not any limit imposed upon one inspire a desire to go beyond it? Does not our keenest suffering arise when our free will is crossed? -- Honore De Balzac
Sects differ more in name than tenets. -- Honore De Balzac
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action. -- Honore De Balzac
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband. -- Honore De Balzac
A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity. -- Honore De Balzac
Misfortune is a stepping stone for genius, the baptismal font of Christians, treasure for the skillful man, an abyss for the feeble. -- Honore De Balzac
For avarice begins where poverty ends. -- Honore De Balzac
Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph. -- Honore De Balzac
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue. -- Honore De Balzac
No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite. -- Honore De Balzac
Now literary success can only be won in solitude by persevering labor. -- Honore De Balzac
Charity is not one of the virtues practiced on the stock market. The heart of a bank is but one of many viscera. -- Honore De Balzac
Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves. -- Honore De Balzac
Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness. -- Honore De Balzac
In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge. -- Honore De Balzac
He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
The greatest joy a petty soul can taste is to dupe a great soul and catch it in a snare. -- Honore De Balzac
The election of a deputy to the Legislature offers a noble and majestic spectacle comparable only to the delivery of a child. It involves the same efforts, the same impurities, the same laceration, and the same triumph. -- Honore De Balzac
Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only. -- Honore De Balzac
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth. -- Honore De Balzac
What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor? -- Honore De Balzac
The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true -- Honore De Balzac
There are words which cut like steel. -- Honore De Balzac
For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy? -- Honore De Balzac
Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are. -- Honore De Balzac
To speak of love is to make love. -- Honore De Balzac
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. -- Honore De Balzac
We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing. -- Honore De Balzac
With the faculty for severe logic sedulously cultivated by elderly women during long evenings of gossip till they can always find an hypothesis to fit all circumstances, -- Honore De Balzac
Today, when everything is intellectual competition, a man must be capable of sitting in his chair at a desk for forty-eight hours straight just as a general had to sit for two days in his saddle on horseback. -- Honore De Balzac
She was white like the sands, tawny like the sands, solitary and burning like the sands. -- Honore De Balzac
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps. -- Honore De Balzac
For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth. -- Honore De Balzac
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence. -- Honore De Balzac
The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does. -- Honore De Balzac
The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l'habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit. -- Honore De Balzac
In all lands, sailors form a race apart. They profess a congenital contempt for landlubbers. As for the tradesman, he understands nothing of sailors nor cares a fig about them. He is content to rob them if he can. -- Honore De Balzac
In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted. -- Honore De Balzac
To have fame follow us is well, but it is not a desirable avant-courier. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm. -- Honore De Balzac
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
For a father it is hell to be without your children; -- Honore De Balzac
Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies. -- Honore De Balzac
When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death. -- Honore De Balzac
While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living. -- Honore De Balzac
To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved. -- Honore De Balzac
Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses. -- Honore De Balzac
Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light. -- Honore De Balzac
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better. -- Honore De Balzac
A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed! -- Honore De Balzac
For she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through - the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form, -- Honore De Balzac
Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves. -- Honore De Balzac
Six weeks with a fever is an eternity. -- Honore De Balzac
And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink. -- Honore De Balzac
He became ... the ideal of that virtue which delights in its own work ... doing everything with simplicity and dignity, for he seemed to realize that his objective added nobility to everything he did. -- Honore De Balzac
The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times. -- Honore De Balzac
The region is a desert of stones, a solitude with a character of its own, an arid spot, which could only be inhabited by beings who had either attained to absolute nullity, or were gifted with some abnormal strength of soul. -- Honore De Balzac
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants. -- Honore De Balzac
Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences. -- Honore De Balzac
As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative. -- Honore De Balzac
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? -- Honore De Balzac
Imagination helps bring out the realism of every detail and only sees the beauties of the work. -- Honore De Balzac
Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant. -- Honore De Balzac
The happier a man, the more apt he is to tremble. In hearts exclusively tender, anxiety and jealousy are in exact proportion to happiness. -- Honore De Balzac
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich. -- Honore De Balzac
We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked. -- Honore De Balzac
Trust no one until you are very sure of the heart to which you open your heart. Learn to mistrust every one; take every precaution for the sake of the love which does not exist as yet. -- Honore De Balzac
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin. -- Honore De Balzac
No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect. -- Honore De Balzac
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice. -- Honore De Balzac
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended? -- Honore De Balzac
Authentic love always assumes the mystery of modesty, even in its expression, because actions speak louder than words. Unlike a feigned love, it feels no need to set a conflagration. -- Honore De Balzac
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye. -- Honore De Balzac
When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse. -- Honore De Balzac
France is a country that loves to change their government if it is always the same. -- Honore De Balzac
Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones. -- Honore De Balzac
For a woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea -- Honore De Balzac
Lucien took the cigar and lit it, in the Spanish fashion, from that of the priest. "He is right," Lucien thought; "there is plenty of time to kill myself. -- Honore De Balzac
To say to a rich man: You are poor! is to tell the Archbishop of Granada that his sermons are worthless. -- Honore De Balzac
Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. -- Honore De Balzac
Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence. -- Honore De Balzac
The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs. -- Honore De Balzac
Though your vulgarian does not readily admit that feelings can change overnight, certainly two lovers often part far more abruptly than they came together. -- Honore De Balzac
People who are in love suspect nothing or everything. -- Honore De Balzac
The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker. -- Honore De Balzac
Mon Dieu! why could they not always be little girls? -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings. -- Honore De Balzac
A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
A husband and wife found themselves in love with each other for the first time after twenty-seven years of marriage. -- Honore De Balzac
The most callous of her guests admired her as young Rome applauded some gladiator who could die smiling. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable. -- Honore De Balzac
By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct. -- Honore De Balzac
An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity. -- Honore De Balzac
As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move ... similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle. -- Honore De Balzac
The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument. -- Honore De Balzac
Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities. -- Honore De Balzac
Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable. -- Honore De Balzac
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa. -- Honore De Balzac
Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live. -- Honore De Balzac
It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time. -- Honore De Balzac
Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers. -- Honore De Balzac
All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept. -- Honore De Balzac
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure. -- Honore De Balzac
Surely a man must be in a parlours state to excite pity, extremely weak to inspire sympathy, or very evil-looking to make a soul tremble in a den like this, where pain must hold its tongue, poverty remain cheerful, and despair retain its self respect. -- Honore De Balzac
Money brings everything to you; even your daughters. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect. -- Honore De Balzac
A woman must be a genius to create a good husband. -- Honore De Balzac
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over. -- Honore De Balzac
How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice! -- Honore De Balzac
Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious. -- Honore De Balzac
Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular! -- Honore De Balzac
there is something still more appalling than the ingratitude of daughters who have cast off their old father and wish that he were dead, and that is a rivalry between two sisters. -- Honore De Balzac
Let nothing dupe you! Such is the horrible maxim that acts as a solvent upon every noble feeling man experiences. -- Honore De Balzac
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital. -- Honore De Balzac
A vocation is born to us all; happily most of us meet promptly our twin,
occupation. -- Honore De Balzac
Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right. -- Honore De Balzac
This costume, utterly uncouth, seemed to have been invented as a final test of grace, and to show that there was nothing too ridiculous for fashion to consecrate. -- Honore De Balzac
Those who spend too fast never grow rich. -- Honore De Balzac
Our most natural feelings are those we are loath to confess, and fatuity is among them. -- Honore De Balzac
My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, Serve all, love one. -- Honore De Balzac
Gentleness in the gait is what simplicity is in the dress. Violent gestures or quick movements inspire involuntary disrespect. -- Honore De Balzac
No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love. -- Honore De Balzac
Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives. -- Honore De Balzac
One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others. -- Honore De Balzac
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman. -- Honore De Balzac
We women never care about anything that no one else will take. -- Honore De Balzac
Love is the poetry of the senses! -- Honore De Balzac
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul. -- Honore De Balzac
Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises. -- Honore De Balzac
Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them. -- Honore De Balzac
Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance. -- Honore De Balzac
Journalism, look you, is the religion of modern society. -- Honore De Balzac
Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune. -- Honore De Balzac
A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry. -- Honore De Balzac
If you have any mind to keep my respect, I recommend you not to add imbecility to these qualities by imagining that such a girl as I am will be content with your asthmatic love, and not look for youth and good looks and pleasure by way of a variety - -- Honore De Balzac
My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts. -- Honore De Balzac
Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined. -- Honore De Balzac
Only, the working-man dies in hospital when the last term of his stunted growth expires; whereas the man of the middle class is set upon living, and lives on, but in a state of idiocy. You -- Honore De Balzac
Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners. -- Honore De Balzac
Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature? -- Honore De Balzac
Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire. -- Honore De Balzac
Where poverty ceases, avarice begins. -- Honore De Balzac
The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes. -- Honore De Balzac
In a world of hunchbacks, a fine figure becomes a monstrosity. -- Honore De Balzac
Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions. -- Honore De Balzac
So often it happens that this one or that stands condemned by the social laws that govern family relations; and yet there are peculiar circumstances in the case, differences of temperament, divergent interests, innumerable complications of family life that excuse the apparent offence. -- Honore De Balzac
What do we know of the world, of business, or men, or life? Our fathers should think for us! -- Honore De Balzac
I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity. -- Honore De Balzac
Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit. -- Honore De Balzac
Poverty has in its favour an exquisite sleep filled with beautiful dreams. -- Honore De Balzac
Journalists grow accustomed to seeing evil and they let it pass; they proceed to approve it, and they end by committing it themselves. -- Honore De Balzac
Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness. -- Honore De Balzac
In looking forward to what remains to be done, my readers will perhaps echo what my publishers say, "Please God to spare you!" I only ask to be less tormented by men and things than I have hitherto been since I began this terrific labor. I -- Honore De Balzac
Nothing can afford a woman greater pleasure than to hear tender words of love. The strictest, most devout woman will listen even if she must not answer. -- Honore De Balzac
A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion. -- Honore De Balzac
Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart like a viper in its hole. -- Honore De Balzac
Mankind are not perfect, but one age is more or less hypocritical than another, and then simpletons say that its morality is high or low. -- Honore De Balzac
What is art? Nature concentrated. -- Honore De Balzac
The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can. -- Honore De Balzac
The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan. -- Honore De Balzac
Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers. -- Honore De Balzac
Virtue will cut your head off, vice will only cut your hair. -- Honore De Balzac
Reproach is usually honest, which is more than can be said of praise. -- Honore De Balzac
One hour of love has a whole life in it. -- Honore De Balzac
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues. -- Honore De Balzac
The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness. -- Honore De Balzac
Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones. -- Honore De Balzac
He had eaten as much as a travelling actor and drunk like the sands of the desert Maxence Gilet -- Honore De Balzac
Well, then, this Loriot, who sold corn to those butchers, has never had but one passion, they say - he idolizes his daughters. -- Honore De Balzac
The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger. -- Honore De Balzac
With monuments as with men, position means everything. -- Honore De Balzac
A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent. -- Honore De Balzac
There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it. -- Honore De Balzac
You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters. -- Honore De Balzac
If you decide to join up with me, I want it to be because you're making a rational choice, not because you've been pushed by passion or despair. -- Honore De Balzac
Rich women need not fear old age; their gold can always create about them any feelings necessary to their happiness. -- Honore De Balzac
Tradesmen regard an author with a mixed feeling of terror, compassion and curiosity. -- Honore De Balzac
Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival. -- Honore De Balzac
Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns. -- Honore De Balzac
Materialism and spirituality are two pretty racquets with which charlatans in cap and gown make the same ball fly. -- Honore De Balzac
As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature
in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing
he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural. -- Honore De Balzac
I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. -- Honore De Balzac
Thought is the only treasure that God sets outside all power and keeps to serve as a secret link among the unhappy. -- Honore De Balzac
Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not. -- Honore De Balzac
Men bow before the power of genius; they hate it, and try to slander it, because genius does not divide the spoil; but if genius persists, they bow before it. -- Honore De Balzac
A knowledge of mankind and of things that surround us gives us that second education which proves far move valuable than our first because it alone turns out a truly accomplished man. -- Honore De Balzac
A man who prides himself on going in a straight line through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility. -- Honore De Balzac
Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed. -- Honore De Balzac
Behind every fortune there is a crime. -- Honore De Balzac
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other. -- Honore De Balzac
They ended as all great passions do end - by a misunderstanding. -- Honore De Balzac
Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims. -- Honore De Balzac
In the desert there is everything and nothing-- God without mankind. -- Honore De Balzac
The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred -- Honore De Balzac
Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream. -- Honore De Balzac
If only I could bear all your sorrows for you! . . . Ah! you were so happy when you were little and still with me - -- Honore De Balzac
When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army -- Honore De Balzac
Virtue is always too much of a piece and too ignorant of those shades of feeling and of temperament that enable us to squint when we are placed in a false position. -- Honore De Balzac
Let us leave the cure of public evils to those quacks, the statesmen. -- Honore De Balzac
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane -- Honore De Balzac
There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
For a sick man the world begins at his pillow and ends at the foot of his bed. -- Honore De Balzac
Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.' -- Honore De Balzac
When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary. -- Honore De Balzac
A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur. -- Honore De Balzac
Like the moth whose feet are caught in the molten wax of a candle, Rouget rapidly used up his remaining energy. -- Honore De Balzac
Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally. -- Honore De Balzac
She was, as you know already without as yet knowing anything, the Lily of this valley, where she grew for heaven, filling it with the fragrance of her virtues. -- Honore De Balzac
On my honor, I believe it is characteristic of virtue to have nothing to do with riches!" thought he. -- Honore De Balzac
Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress.
Many men desire to have these two editions of the same work, although it is proof of deep inferiority in a man if he cannot make his wife his mistress. Seeking variety is a sign of impotence. -- Honore De Balzac
Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry. -- Honore De Balzac
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true. -- Honore De Balzac
Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad. -- Honore De Balzac
Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret. -- Honore De Balzac
Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue. -- Honore De Balzac
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself. -- Honore De Balzac
Like evil, sublimity is also contagious. -- Honore De Balzac
Happiness has no history and the story tellers of all lands have understood this so well that the words "they are happy" are the end pf every love tale. -- Honore De Balzac
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. -- Honore De Balzac
We love because we love. -- Honore De Balzac
When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power. -- Honore De Balzac
Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life. -- Honore De Balzac
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside. -- Honore De Balzac
Only just now she said to me, 'I am very happy, papa!' When they say 'father' stiffly, it sends a chill through me; but when they call me 'papa,' it brings all the old memories back. I feel most their father then; I even believe that they belong to me, and to no one else. -- Honore De Balzac
Ah! Lord God in heaven! how ill Thy world is ordered! Thou hast a Son, if what they tell us is true, and yet Thou leavest us to suffer so through our children. -- Honore De Balzac
Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind. -- Honore De Balzac
So an honest man is the common enemy. -- Honore De Balzac
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity. -- Honore De Balzac
White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young. -- Honore De Balzac
The privilege of feeling at home everywhere belongs only to kings, wolves and robbers. -- Honore De Balzac
Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects. -- Honore De Balzac
All we are is in the soul. -- Honore De Balzac
All is true, - so true, that every one can discern the elements of the tragedy in his own house, perhaps in his own heart. -- Honore De Balzac
We cannot confront solitude without moral resources. -- Honore De Balzac
Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine. -- Honore De Balzac
I am a galley slave to pen and ink. -- Honore De Balzac
In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents. -- Honore De Balzac
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love. -- Honore De Balzac
It is quite right what they say: the three most beautiful sights in
the world are a ship in full sail, a galloping horse, and a woman
dancing. -- Honore De Balzac
Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all. -- Honore De Balzac
an honest man is the man who keeps his own counsel, and will not divide the plunder. -- Honore De Balzac
Equality may be the law, but no human power can install it. -- Honore De Balzac
The more you judge, the less you love. -- Honore De Balzac
Ah! the soft starlight of virgin eyes. -- Honore De Balzac
Every day, before our eyes, a moral phenomenon of amazing profundity takes place which is, nevertheless, so simple as never to be noticed. -- Honore De Balzac
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman. -- Honore De Balzac
It is one of the most detestable habits of a Liliputian mind to credit other people with its own malignant pettiness. -- Honore De Balzac
Build no barricades when no one attacks you. Don't excite tempests of heart and conscience merely to pacify your conscience and quiet your heart, now ruffled only by a tiny breeze. -- Honore De Balzac
People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply. -- Honore De Balzac
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing. -- Honore De Balzac
We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment. -- Honore De Balzac
The rout, that dreary review of fashionable fineries, that parade of well-dressed self-infatuations, is one of those English inventions currently mechanifying the other nations. England seems determined to see the entire world bored just as she is, and just as bored as she. -- Honore De Balzac
A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself. -- Honore De Balzac
Happiness is the inner poetry of women, just as fine clothes are the mask of beauty -- Honore De Balzac
Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune. -- Honore De Balzac
Chooses with the men who seem to her agreeable, without being entered on the tablets of gossip. Certain coquettish women are capable of following a plan of this kind for seven years in order to gratify their fancies -- Honore De Balzac
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart. -- Honore De Balzac