145 quotes
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
Letters of Two Brides (1841)
Discretion is the best form of calculation.
The Girl with Golden Eyes (1833)
A tear is a misfortune, a stain is a vice.
Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.
Letters of Two Brides (1841)
We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.
Séraphîta (1835)
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
The winters are to fashionable women what a campaign once was to the soldiers of the Empire.
To kill a relative of whom you are tired, is something; but to inherit his property afterwards — that is a real pleasure!
Suicide, moreover, was at that time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
A Daughter of Eve (1839)
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
A Daughter of Eve (1839)
A mother’s life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
Letters of Two Brides (1841)
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
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.
Physiologie du Mariage (1829)
"I am tormented by temptations."
"What kind? There is a cure for temptation."
"What?"
"Yielding to it."
Father Goriot (1835)
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
A Woman of Thirty (1842)
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
No man would have torn himself from the comfort of a morning nap to listen to a minstrel in a jacket; none but a maid awakes to songs of love.
Pierrette (1840)
Between persons who are perpetually in each other's company dislike or love increases daily; every moment brings reasons to love or hate each other more and more.
The Vicar of Tours (1832)
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.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)
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.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)