-
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Honore de Balzac
-
For avarice begins where poverty ends.
Honore de Balzac
-
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Honore de Balzac
-
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
Are not poets men who fulfill their hopes prematurely?
Honore de Balzac
-
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
Honore de Balzac
-
Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed!
Honore de Balzac
-
Novelty is both delightful and deceptive.
Honore de Balzac
-
Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
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?
Honore de Balzac
-
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.
Honore de Balzac
-
White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.
Honore de Balzac
-
Six weeks with a fever is an eternity.
Honore de Balzac
-
Life cannot go on without much forgetting.
Honore de Balzac
