Honoré de Balzac - Man Quotes

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If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment — giving to that word its exact significance. Man does not create forces; he employs the only force that exists and which includes all others, namely Motion, the breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe.

Honoré de Balzac
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.

Honoré de Balzac
In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.

Honoré de Balzac
A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent.

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
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

Honoré de Balzac
Man is imperfect. He is at some times more or less hypocritical than at others, and then simpletons say that his morality is high or low.

Honoré de Balzac
No man has yet discovered the means of giving successfully friendly advice to women — not even to his own.

Honoré de Balzac
Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

Honoré de Balzac
No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.

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
Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

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

Honoré de Balzac
If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.

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

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

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
In a husband there is only a man; in a married woman there is a man, a father, and mother, and a woman.

Honoré de Balzac
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.

Honoré de Balzac
A man cannot marry before he has studied anatomy and has dissected at the least one woman.

Honoré de Balzac
Man is no angel. He is sometimes more of a hypocrite and sometimes less, and then fools say that he has or has not principles.

Honoré de Balzac
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

Honoré de Balzac
A man must be a fool, who does not succeed in making a woman believe that which flatters her.

Honoré de Balzac
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

Honoré de Balzac
The man who enters his wife's dressing-room is either a philosopher, or a fool.

Honoré de Balzac
A weapon is anything that can serve to wound; and sentiments are perhaps the most cruel weapons man can employ to wound his fellow man.

Honoré de Balzac
Man may go from aversion to love; but, when he has begun by loving, and has reached aversion, he never returns to love.

Honoré de Balzac
Every woman carries in the depths of her soul a mysterious weapon, instinct — that virgin instinct, incorruptible, which requires her neither to learn, to reason, nor to know, which binds the strong will of man, dominates his sovereign reason, and pales our little scientific tapers.

Honoré de Balzac
When a woman pronounces the name of a man but twice a day, there may be some doubt as to the nature of her sentiments; but three times!...

Honoré de Balzac
How frightful is man's condition! There is not one of his joys which does not come from some ignorance or other.

Honoré de Balzac