Honore de Balzac Quotes

...love him enough to give him this, even if it's at the price of your pride." (Annette to Cat)

We wish to constitute all the happiness, or, if that cannot be, the misery of the one we love.

Is it really worth dying for the person you love?

Such ever was love's way: to rise, it stoops.

She better liked to see him free and happy, even than to have him near her, because she loved him better than herself.

Man has his will, but woman has her way.

I would give up everything for you, Giulia" I smiled at him gently. "But you must understand. I should never want a man to give up anything for me. I should want him to feel in winning me he has won the whole world.

he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.

A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self indulgence.

Great loves were almost always great tragedies. Perhaps it was because love was never truly great until the element of sacrifice entered into it.

I will hate the man you choose because he isn't me, and love him if he makes you smile.

There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.

I don't care," said Seth. "I would have done it. I would have sold my soul for you. You and me...I told you. Something's always going to keep us near each other...even if we aren't together.

At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan.

All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.

Love is woman's eternal spring and man's eternal fall. It is a game at which men must play against stacked cards, and without the slightest inkling of the trump.

A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.

Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.

Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

Love demands all, and has a right to all.

As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

Am I a man? To want you so badly that nothing else matters? To see you, and know I would sacrifice honor or family or life itself to lie wi' you, even though ye'd left me?

And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn't matter.

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.