Quotes from Honore de Balzac

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

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

What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.

Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles.

Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.

Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.

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

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

One hour of love has a whole life in it.

Love knows nothing of modesty.

True love rules especially through memory.

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

Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another.

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.

The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

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

For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.

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.

To speak of love is to make love.

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

Love which economizes is never true love.