Honore de Balzac Quotes
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All happiness depends on courage and work.
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Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.
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Resignation is a daily suicide.
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Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.
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One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
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Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.
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You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.
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Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
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An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
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When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
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When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.
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Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.
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Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
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The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
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You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
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Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
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One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.
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It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.
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There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
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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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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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In a world of hunchbacks, a fine figure becomes a monstrosity.
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Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
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A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.