Honoré de Balzac - Woman Quotes

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The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.

Honoré de Balzac
A woman, when she has passed forty, becomes an illegible scrawl; only an old woman is capable of divining old women.

Honoré de Balzac
The first thing necessary to win the heart of a woman is opportunity.

Honoré de Balzac
Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.

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
What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible.

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
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
It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.

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

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
A lover is a herald who proclaims the merit, the wit, or the beauty of a woman: what does a husband proclaim?

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
Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.

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
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
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.

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

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 woman is a well-served table, that one sees with different eyes before and after the meal.

Honoré de Balzac
There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.

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
A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.

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

Honoré de Balzac
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

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
Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

Honoré de Balzac