Quotes from balzac honore de v

What husband will be able to sleep peacefully beside his young and beautiful wife while he knows that three celibates, at least, are on the watch; that if they have not already encroached upon his little property, they regard the bride as their destined prey, for sooner or later she will fall into their hands, either by stratagem, compulsive conquest or free choice?

Thwarted passion and mortified vanity are great babblers.

A man must not flatter himself that he knows his wife, and is making her happy unless he sees her often at his knees.

His life flowed soundless as the sands of an hour-glass.

A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no political opinions.

In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance, owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him.

To be able to keep a mother-in-law in the country while he lives in Paris, and vice versa, is a piece of good fortune which a husband too rarely meets with.

The caresses over which love presides are always pure.

If a man cannot distinguish the difference between the pleasures of two consecutive nights, he has married too early.

What frightful tableaux might present themselves, if one could paint the ideas found in the souls of those who surround the deathbeds? And money is always the mobilizer of the intrigues elaborated, the plans formulated, the conspiracies woven!

Singular creature, he had never cared to find out a single relative among four generations counted on the female side. The thought of his heirs was abhorrent to him; and the idea that his wealth could pass into other hands after his death simply inconceivable.

You were at one time her god, her idol. She has now reached that height of devotion at which it is permitted to see holes in the garments of the saints.

Civilization is come. It has shut up a million of men within an area of four square leagues; it has stalled them in streets, houses, apartments, rooms, and chambers eight feet square; after a time it will make them shut up one upon another like the tubes of a telescope.

At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx.

The inexorable box which keeps its mouth open to all comers receives its epistolary provender from all hands.