Quotes from balzac honore de xi

If a man strike his mistress it is a self-inflicted wound; but if he strike his wife it is suicide!

What an admirable maneuver it would be to make a wife dance, and to feed her on vegetables!

I went to bed sorrowful, and I still suffer from the shock produced by this first collision of my frank, joyous nature with the harsh laws of society. Already the highway hedges are flecked with my white wool!

Nature has favored our sex in giving us a choice between love and motherhood. I have made mine. My children shall be my gods, and this spot of earth my Eldorado.

A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.

In these times, liberty is no longer proscribed; it is going its rounds again.

Alas! if your wife has not yet kissed the apple of the Serpent, the Serpent stands before her.

Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother's place in warding off evil.

Wit is thought to be a quality rare in comedians. It is so natural to suppose that persons who spend their lives in showing things on the outside have nothing within.

Even thrones rise and fall in France with fearful rapidity. Fifteen years have wreaked their will on a great empire, a monarchy, and a revolution. No one can now dare to count upon the future.

Though all things in society as well as in the universe are said to have a purpose, there do exist here below certain beings whose purpose and utility seem inexplicable.

Moral philosophy and political economy both condemn the individual who consumes without producing; who fills a place on the earth but does not shed upon it either good or evil--for evil is sometimes good the meaning of which is not at once made manifest.

Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders--Matter and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite.

Silence is the only weapon by which such victims can conquer; it baffles the Cossack charges of envy, the savage skirmishings of suspicion; it does at times give victory, crushing and complete--for what is more complete than silence? it is absolute; it is one of the attributes of infinity.