My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."
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Citations by Honoré de Balzac
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
Ideas consume the ages as passions consume men. When man is cured, humanity may possibly cure itself.
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Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother's place in warding off evil. These are the three cardinal virtues in matrimony.
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Tyranny produces two results, exactly opposite in character, and which are symbolized in those two great types of the slave in classical times — Epictetus and Spartacus. The one is hatred with its evil train, the other meekness with its Christian graces.
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Girls brought up as you were, in a very strait-laced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined. Those are the girls that make bad wives.
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Like many widows, she came to the unwise decision of remarrying.
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In France, and that, too, during the most serious epoch of modern history, no woman, unless it be Brunehaut or Fredegonde, has suffered from popular error so much as Catherine dè Medici; whereas Marie dè Medici, all of whose actions were prejudicial to France, has escaped the shame which ought to cover her name... Catherine dè Medici, on the contrary, saved the crown of France; she maintained the royal authority in the midst of circumstances under which more than one great prince would have succumbed. Having to make head against factions and ambitions like those of the Guises and the house of Bourbon, against men such as the two Cardinals of Lorraine, the two Balafrés, and the two Condés, against the queen Jeanne d'Albret, Henri iv., the Connetable de Montmorency, Calvin, the three Colignys, Theodore de Beze, she needed to possess and to display the rare qualities and precious gifts of a statesman under the mocking fire of the Calvinist
press.
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Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
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A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
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If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment — giving to that word its exact significance. Man does not create forces; he employs the only force that exists and which includes all others, namely Motion, the breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe.
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