Honoré de Balzac - Love Quotes

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When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even for our virtues.

Honoré de Balzac
A man who can love deeply is never utterly contemptible.

Honoré de Balzac
The greatest tyranny is to love where we are not loved again.

Honoré de Balzac
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.

Honoré de Balzac
In love, a woman is like a lyre that surrenders its secrets only to the hand that knows how to touch its strings.

Honoré de Balzac
The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

Honoré de Balzac
When all that is fond in our nature is most thoroughly awakened, when we feel most deeply and tenderly — even then, love is so conscious of its instability that we are irresistibly prompted to ask: Do you love me? Will you love me always?

Honoré de Balzac
A woman who is guided by the head, and not by the heart, is a social pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without love, without virtue, without sex.

Honoré de Balzac
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

Honoré de Balzac
When two beings are united by love, all social conventionalities are suspended.

Honoré de Balzac
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

Honoré de Balzac
Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world. Thus man takes note of more than he is able to explain, while the Angelic Spirit sees and comprehends. Science depresses man; Love exalts the Angel. Science is still seeking, Love has found. Man judges Nature according to his own relations to her; the Angelic Spirit judges it in its relation to Heaven. In short, all things have a voice for the Spirit.

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

Honoré de Balzac
In the elevated order of ideas, the life of man is glory; the life of woman is love.

Honoré de Balzac
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Honoré de Balzac
To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.

Honoré de Balzac
The laws of love unite man and woman so strongly that no human laws can separate them.

Honoré de Balzac
Between two beings susceptible to love, the duration of love depends upon the first resistance of the woman, or the obstacles that society puts in their way.

Honoré de Balzac
In love, one must not attack a place unless one storms it.

Honoré de Balzac
Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by Love.

Honoré de Balzac
It is as absurd to pretend that one can not love the same woman always, as to pretend that a good artist needs several violins to execute a piece of music.

Honoré de Balzac
A sick man, surrounded by those who love him, nursed by those who wish earnestly that he should live, will recover (all other things being equal), when another patient tended by hirelings will die. Doctors decline to see unconscious magnestism in this phenomenon; for them it is the result of intelligent nursing, of exact obedience to their orders; but many a mother knows the virtue of such ardent projections of strong, unceasing prayer.

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

Honoré de Balzac
Love is like some fresh spring that leaves its cresses, its gravel bed, and flowers to become first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.

Honoré de Balzac
Modesty, or rather a fear of being unworthy, is one of the first virtues aroused by love.

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

Honoré de Balzac
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.

Honoré de Balzac
True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe's conceit.

Honoré de Balzac
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.

Honoré de Balzac
Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.

Honoré de Balzac