Honore de Balzac Men Quotations

We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment.

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.

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

Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual. Misfortune is a stepping stone for a genius, a piscina for a Christian, a treasure for a man of parts, and an abyss for a weakling.

It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.

Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.

Nos beaux sentiments ne sont-ils pas les poe sies de la volonte ? Aren't our best feelings poetry of the will?

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

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.

Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders.

Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers.

A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed!

A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.

The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?

Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.

Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.

Are not poets men who fulfill their hopes prematurely?

Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.

Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.

A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.

Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.

In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted.

Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.

Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

With monuments as with men, position means everything.

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

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

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.

Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman.

The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.

Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.

Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival.

My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one.

A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.

Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.

The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.

He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"--the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved.

I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore the ordinary rules of common-sense.

Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.

Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.

All men can bear a familiar, definite misfortune better than the cruel alternations of a fate which, from one moment to another, brings excessive joy or sorrow.

When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.

By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct.

According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.

Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?

The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.

The happier a man, the more apt he is to tremble. In hearts exclusively tender, anxiety and jealousy are in exact proportion to happiness.

A knowledge of mankind and of things that surround us gives us that second education which proves far move valuable than our first because it alone turns out a truly accomplished man.

Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.

With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.

One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.

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

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

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

God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.

Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.

In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.

For businessmen, the world is a bale of banknotes in circulation; for most young men, it is a woman; for some women, it is a man; and for others it may be a salon, a coterie, a part of town or a whole city.

Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues.

Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.

When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.

One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.

One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.

To say to a rich man: You are poor! is to tell the Archbishop of Granada that his sermons are worthless.

Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.

Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.

Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims.

The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.

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

If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance.

Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks.

France is a country that loves to change their government if it is always the same.

Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right.

Yes, I can understand that a man might go to a gambling table when he sees that all that lies between him and death is his last crown.

Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.

No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.

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.

Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.

Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.

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.

A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.

Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.

Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.

By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.

A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible.

A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.

The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.

Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world--the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?

Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.