Honore de Balzac Quotes

You are my sweetest downfall.

True, I am in love with suffering, but I do not know if I deserve the honor.

Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.

Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.

Love is the bane of honor, the death of duty.

Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest.

I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn't change them. That hurt.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.

Luce didn't know how to pull away from Cam.

In real life, love has to be possible. Even if it is not returned right away, love can only survive when the hope exists that you will be able to win over the person you desire.

But the humans weren't what made my steps falter as I walked through grass that had turned bright green with summer's touch. It was Dimitri. Always Dimitri. Dimitri, the man I loved. Dimitri, the Strigoi I wanted to save. Dimitri, the monster I'd most likely have to kill. The love we'd shared always burned within me, no matter how often I told myself to move on, no matter how much the world did think I'd move on. He was always with me, always on my mind, always making me question myself.

I only know that I love you. That's your misfortune.

Any place you love is the world to you”, explained the pensive Catherine Wheel, who had been attached to an old deal box in early life, and prided herself on her broken heart; “but love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once- But it is no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.

Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand." - Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}

In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.

Though you treat me badly, I love you madly.

if you love two people at the same time, choose the second. Because if you really loved the first one, you wouldn't have fallen for the second.

Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings.

Did you really think I'd ceased to care? Kitten, I care so much it wrecks me.

Love has this in common with scruples, that it becomes embittered by the reflections and the thoughts that beset us to free ourselves.

Love's but the frailty of the mind, When 'tis not with ambition joined; A sickly flame, which if not fed expires; And feeding, wastes in self-consuming fires.

Love can take what shape he pleases; and when once begun his fiery inroad in the soul, how vain the after knowledge which his presence gives! We weep or rave; but still he lives, and lives master and lord, amidst pride and tears and pain.

When love ceases to be tragic it is something else and the individual again throws himself in search of tragedy.

He shrank from hearing Margaret's very name mentioned; he, while he blamed her--while he was jealous of her--while he renounced her--he loved her sorely, in spite of himself.

The day that a woman who is passing before you sheds a light upon you as she goes, you are lost, you love. You have then but one thing to do: to think of her so earnestly that she will be compelled to think of you.