Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Un homme n'a jamais pu e lever sa ma|"tresse jusqu'a' lui; mais une femme place toujours son amant aussi haut qu'elle. A man can never elevate his mistress to his rank, but a woman can always place her lover as high as she.
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The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.
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At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
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A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.
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Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
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A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
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A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
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A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
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Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.
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Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
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Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.
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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.
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It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been brought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.
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Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.
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No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.
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Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
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What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?
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Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.
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The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.
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Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
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Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.
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Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.