Cousin Bette Quotes

“Life cannot go on without a great deal of forgetting.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress.
Many men desire to have these two editions of the same work, although it is proof of deep inferiority in a man if he cannot make his wife his mistress. Seeking variety is a sign of impotence.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“for she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through —the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form,”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Virtue will cut your head off, vice will only cut your hair.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Women always persuade men they have made into sheep that they are lions with a will of iron.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“A ignorância é a mãe de todos os crimes, porque um crime é, antes de mais, uma falta de raciocínio.”
― Honoré de Balzac, A Prima Bette

“Parent may hinder their children's marriage; but children cannot interfere with the insane acts of their parents in their second childhood.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“The savage has only impulse; the civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at a time.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Et voilà que , comme dans l' Ancien Testament , le pauvre possède un seul agneau qui fait son bonheur , et le riche qui a des troupeaux envie la brebis du pauvre et la lui dérobe ! ... sans le prévenir , sans la lui demander .”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Beauty is the greatest of human powers. All autocratic, unbridled power, with nothing to counterbalance it, leads to abuse, to mad excess. Despotism is power gone mad. In women, despotism takes the form of satisfying their whims.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Seducers, whose motives are mean, can never understand magnanimous minds.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Kaunis ei ole sen arvoista kuin kestävä, ja kestävä, se olen minä!”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“More solemn oaths are often sworn by a look and a movement of the head than are heard in law-courts.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Like a true Parisian creole, Madame Marneffe detested having to exert herself. She had the cool indifference of cats, who run and pounce only when obliged to by necessity. She required life to be all pleasure, and pleasure to be all calm plain sailing.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“In revolutions as in storms at sea solid worth goes to the bottom, while the current brings light trash floating to the surface.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Many married women, faithful to family duty and their husbands, will at this point probably ask themselves why such strong men, so really good and kind, who are so vulnerable to women like Madame Marneffe, do not find the realization of their dreams and the fulfilment of their passions in their wives, especially when their wives are like Adeline Hulot.
The reason is linked with one of the most fundamental mysteries of human nature. Love, which awakens the mind to joy and delight, the virile, austere pleasure of the most noble faculties of the soul, and sex, the vulgar commodity sold in the market, are two aspects of the same thing. Women capable of satisfying the hunger for both are geniuses in their own kind, and no more numerous than the great writers, artists, and inventors of a nation. Men of all kinds, the distinguished man and the fool, the Hulots as much as the Crevels, desire both an ideal love and pleasure. They are all in quest of that mysterious hermaphrodite, that rare work, which most often turns out to be a work in two volumes.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Give a hard-pressed Parisian woman twenty-four hours to work, and she can bring down a government.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Men pursuing some financial interest in the end break away from one other; those with a vice have always a common interest.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“The illusions of pretended love are more beguiling than the real thing. True love admits of sparrows' bickering quarrels, in which one may be pierced to the heart; but a quarrel which is only make-believe, on the contrary, is a caress to a dupe's vanity.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“The delights of gratified hatred are among the fiercest and most ardent that the heart can feel. Love is the gold, but hate is the iron of that mine of the emotions that lies within us.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Love and hatred are passions that feed on their own fuel; but of the two, hatred is the more enduring.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Sorrow, like pleasure, creates its own atmosphere. A first glance into any home tells one whether love reigns there, or despair.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“It was a cry of real love. A woman's outburst of despair melts a lover's heart, and the forgiveness that he is secretly eager to give her is easily yielded, especially when the woman is young, beautiful, and wearing a dress so low cut that she could rise from the top of it in the costume of Eve.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Women always persuade men that they are lions, with a will of iron, when they are making sheep of them.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“In two and a half years Steinbock produced a statue and a child. The child was of exquisite beauty; the statue execrable.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Constant labour is the law of art as well as the law of life, for art is the creative activity of the mind. And so great artists, true poets, do not wait for either commissions or clients; they create today, tomorrow, ceaselessly.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“A disdainful woman, above all a dangerous woman, stimulates curious interest as spice seasons good food.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

“Nothing is more irritating to a married man than to meet his wife at every turn, standing in the way of a desire, however fleeting.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette