836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.

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.

Resignation is a daily suicide.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles.

Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted.

Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.

Pity is woman's sweetest charm.

Love endows us with a sort of personal religion; we respect another live within ourselves.