Quotes from balzac honore de xiv

Though the great things of life are simple to understand and easy to express, the littlenesses require a vast number of details to explain them.

Woman understands all things through love; what she does not understand she feels; what she does not feel she sees; when she neither sees, nor feels, nor understands, this angel of earth divines to protect you, and hides her protection beneath the grace of love.

Yes, Prayer--the aspiration of the soul freed absolutely from the body--bears all forces within it, and applies them to the constant and perseverant union of the Visible and the Invisible. When you possess the faculty of praying without weariness, with love, with force, with certainty, with intelligence, your spiritualized nature will presently be invested with power. Like a rushing wind, like a thunderbolt, it cuts its way through all things and shares the power of God.

Thought alone holds the tradition of the bygone life. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

The final life, the fruition of all other lives, to which the powers of the soul have tended, and whose merits open the Sacred Portals to perfected man, is the life of Prayer.

If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!

A woman deprived of her free will can never have the credit of making a sacrifice.

In the life of man there are no two moments of pleasure exactly alike, any more than there are two leaves of identical shape upon the same tree.

In married life, the moment when two hearts come to understand each other is sudden as a flash of lightning, and never returns, when once it is passed.

What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?

True, I have my weak points; but were I a man, I should adore them. They arise from what is most promising in me.

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.

Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which, perhaps, will some day find its Dante.