836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.

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

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

The first thing necessary to win the heart of a woman is opportunity.

But does not happiness come from the soul within?

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

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.