Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.
-
The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?
-
Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
-
A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
-
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
-
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
-
Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.
-
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.
-
The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.
-
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
-
Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.
-
Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
-
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
-
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
-
Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.
-
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
-
It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
-
Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.
-
Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.
-
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.