“Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“Ah! how much a mother learns from her child! The constant protection of a helpless being forces us to so strict an alliance with virtue, that a woman never shows to full advantage except as a mother. Then alone can her character expand in the fulfillment of all life’s duties and the enjoyment of all its pleasures.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“Prayer is the fair and radiant daughter of all the human virtues, the arch connecting heaven and earth, the sweet companion that is alike the lion and the dove; and prayer will give you the key of heaven. As pure and as bold as innocence, as strong as all things are that are entire and single, this fair and invincible queen rests on the material world; she has taken possession of it; for, like the sun, she casts about it a sphere of light.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“At this moment, who would not remain persuaded that these women were virtuous? Are they not the flower of the country? Are they all not fresh, ravishing, intoxicating with beauty, youth, life and love? To believe in their virtue is a kind of social religion; because they are the world’s ornament and the glory of France.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Hypocrisy
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“A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Wealth
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“Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Passion
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“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
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Passion
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“When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“Suffering predisposes the mind to devoutness; and most young girls, prompted by instinctive tenderness, lean towards mysticism, the obscurer side of religion.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman’s destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“To have one’s mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man’s appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Conscience
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“It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been brought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“In France, and at the most important period of our history, Catherine de’ Medici has suffered more from popular error than any other woman, unless it be Brunehaut or Frédégonde; while Marie de’ Medici, whose every action was prejudicial to France, has escaped the disgrace that should cover her name…. Catherine de’ Medici … saved the throne of France, she maintained [the] Royal authority under circumstances to which more than one great prince would have succumbed. Face to face with such leaders of the factions and ambitions of the houses of Guise and of Bourbon as the two Cardinals de Lorraine and the two “Balafrès,” the two Princes de Condé, Queen Jeanne d’Albret, Henri IV, the Connétable de Montmorency, Calvin, the Colignys and Théodore de Bèze, she was forced to put forth the rarest fine qualities, the most essential gifts of statesmanship, under the fire of the Calvinist press.”
Honoré De Balzac
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
