Famous Quotes & Sayings

Honore de Balzac

People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.

Honore de Balzac

The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.

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

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

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

To speak of love is to make love.

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

Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.

Honore de Balzac

You cannot pluck love out of your heart as you would pull a tooth.

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

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

Honore de Balzac

Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.

Honore de Balzac

Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.

Honore de Balzac

In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.

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

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

Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.

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

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

The union of a want and a sentiment.

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

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

A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.

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

The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.

Honore de Balzac

At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan.

Honore de Balzac

Economized love is never real love.

Honore de Balzac

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.

Honore de Balzac

We love because we love.

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

Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing.

Honore de Balzac

Love is the poetry of the senses.

Honore de Balzac

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.