“Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.”

— Honoré de Balzac, book A Woman of Thirty

Les jeunes filles se créent souvent de nobles, de ravissantes images, des figures tout idéales, et se forgent des idées chimériques sur les hommes, sur les sentiments, sur le monde; puis elles attribuent innocemment à un caractère les perfections qu'elles ont rêvées, et s'y confient.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. I: Early Mistakes.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Nov. 1, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extr…" by Honoré de Balzac?

Honoré de Balzac157

French writer 1799–1850

Related quotes

“The human voice may be denominated the music of the mind; language, a figurative mode of expressing our ideas and sentiments. The effects of flowing from this beneficent endowment are overwhelming in contemplation and almost infinite in extent. It is principally instrumental to all the moral and physical improvements of man, and enables him to pour forth his otherwise invisible, inaudible, unfathomable thoughts, to his fellow-man and to his God.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

Philosophical Magazine and Journal Of Science (July-December 1836), p. 346

“Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1990s, Screening History (1992), Ch. 1: The Prince and the Pauper, p. 23

“The idea, to a cat, that somebody else owns him is ludicrous.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002), Ch. 2

“First of all, directing is an idea that you have of a total flow of images that are going on, which are incidentally actors, words, and objects in space. It's an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That's what directing is.”

Abraham Polonsky (1910–1999) American politician

as quoted in Directing the Film, Ed Sherman, 1976.

“Each of us has been endowed with the perfect power to be free. Slavery is a state of mind that fails to acknowledge the slave's own power.”

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 9 : Empowering the Self, p. 117

“Everything starts as somebody's daydream.”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

As quoted in Reader's Digest Quotable Quotes : Wit and Wisdom for All Occasions from America's Most Popular Magazine (1997) by Reader's Digest Association, p. 27

“More men than I have put men to death, but I am the last man in the world that would take a man's life. Two years ago—even if my own life was at stake—and I am confident, if I thought a man would shoot me—I would give him a chance of keeping his life, and would part with my own; but if I knew that through him innocent persons' lives were at stake, I certainly would have to shoot him if he forced me to do so; but I would want to know that he was really going to take my innocent life.”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Sentencing (1880)

“I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.”

Zelda Fitzgerald book Save Me the Waltz

Variant: But I warn you, I am only really myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.
Source: Save Me the Waltz

“An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it — neither higher nor lower.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Contradiction (1947), p. 240

“Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Honoré de Balzac157

Related quotes

Related topics