Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
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For avarice begins where poverty ends.
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Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,-she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.
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Modesty is the conscience of the body.
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Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
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Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.
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It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.
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Are not poets men who fulfill their hopes prematurely?
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Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.
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A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed!
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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.
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When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
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There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
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As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.
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Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
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Novelty is both delightful and deceptive.
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Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.
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Does not any limit imposed upon one inspire a desire to go beyond it? Does not our keenest suffering arise when our free will is crossed?
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La femme marie e est un esclave qu'il faut savoir mettre sur un tro" n e. A married woman is a slave whom one must put on a throne.
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White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.
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Six weeks with a fever is an eternity.
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Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.
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Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.
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The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm.