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Are not all young men ready to trust the promise of a pretty face and to infer beauty of soul from beauty of feature? An indefinable impulse leads them to believe that moral perfection must co-exist with physical perfection.

— Honoré de Balzac

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Beauty

More quotes by Honoré de Balzac

Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world.

Séraphîta (1835)

The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.

Séraphîta (1835)

Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

Séraphîta (1835)

Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colours employed in painting.

Gambara (1837)

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

All Honoré de Balzac quotes →

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Honoré de Balzac (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.