Honore de Balzac Quotations | Page 2

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.

To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.

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.

Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.

The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.

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.

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?

A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.

When women love us they forgive everything.

No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.