Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.
-
Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.
-
A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
-
To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions.
-
The union of a want and a sentiment.
-
Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
-
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
-
For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.
-
The woman you buy takes a great deal of money. The woman who gives herself to you takes all your money.
-
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
-
Reading brings us unknown friends.
-
Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking .. questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world.
-
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.
-
No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.
-
Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.
-
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
-
Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
-
The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.
-
The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.
-
The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.
-
Conventions are often more cruel than the law.
-
A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.
-
The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.
-
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.