Honore de Balzac Love Quotations

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

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

Love knows nothing of modesty.

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

Woman is a most charming creature, who changes her heart as easily as she does her gloves.

Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.

A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.

Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

But also remember: if you have any genuine feelings, hide them like treasure; never let anyone so much as suspect them, or you're lost. Instead of being the executioner, you'll be the victim. And if you ever fall in love, keep that absolutely secret! Never breathe a word until you're completely sure of the person to whom you open your heart. And to protect that love, even before you feel it, learn to despise the world.

L'amour n'est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.

Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.

Self-love is as protective as the Deity; Disenchantment is as perspicacious as a surgeon; Experience is as provident as a mother. Such are the theologic virtues of marriage.

The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.

One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.

Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights.

True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!

Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.

Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.

Love is the only passion which suffers neither past nor future.

A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry.

No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.

People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.

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

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.

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.

Though your vulgarian does not readily admit that feelings can change overnight, certainly two lovers often part far more abruptly than they came together.

To speak of love is to make love.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.

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.

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

A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur.

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.

To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.

The union of a want and a sentiment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Economized love is never real love.

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.

No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.

Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles.

We love because we love.

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.

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.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

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.

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.

For the person who loves God, worship is the daily bread of patience.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

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

The more one judges, the less one loves.