Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
All happiness depends on courage and work.
-
Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
-
A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.
-
It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.
-
Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.
-
A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
-
Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance.
-
The union of a want and a sentiment.
-
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
-
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.
-
She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.
-
While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.
-
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
-
There are words which cut like steel.
-
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
-
No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.
-
What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.
-
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
-
All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
-
It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.
-
The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.
-
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
-
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
-
If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.