Honore de Balzac Quotes

It is easy to sit up and take notice,
What is difficult is getting up and taking action.

When you doubt your power,
you give power to your doubt.

True love is eternal,
infinite,
and always like itself.
It is equal and pure.

The more one judges,
the less one loves.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

Love may be or it may not,
but where it is,
it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

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.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten,
for it was properly done.

From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework,
any other woman can surmise her thoughts.

True love is eternal,
infinite,
and always like itself.
It is equal and pure,
without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife,
but himself.

Many people claim coffee inspires them,
but,
as everybody knows,
coffee only makes boring people even more boring.

Vivacity is the health of the spirit.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.

How natural it is to destroy what we cannot possess,
to deny what we do not understand,
and to insult what we envy!

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.

The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.

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.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

I can no longer think of anything but you.
In spite of myself,
my imagination carries me to you.
I grasp you,
I kiss you,
I caress you,
a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.

A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.

Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly,
stupid or intelligent.
We love because we love.

Equality may be a right,
but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

As a rule,
only the poor are generous.

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.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

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

Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance

Where poverty ceases,
avarice begins.

Talent is a flame,
but genius is a fire.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom;
to serve all,
but love only one.

Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.

According to man's environment,
society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology.
The differences between a soldier,
a workman,
a statesman,
a tradesman,
a sailor,
a poet,
a pauper and a priest,
are more difficult to seize,
but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf,
a lion,
an ass,
a crow,
a sea-calf,
a sheep,
and so on.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second;
with a husband it runs the other way.

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.

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

All happiness depends on courage and work.
I have had many periods of wretchedness,
but with energy and above all with illusions,
I pulled through them all.

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.

The art of motherhood involves much silent,
unobtrusive self-denial,
an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.