Honore de Balzac Quotes
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It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it.
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How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene. 'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.' 'And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer.
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The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.
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Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.
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The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
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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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Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.
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When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
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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.
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Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
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Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
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No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
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All happiness depends on courage and work.
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Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.
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Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
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A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
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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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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
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For businessmen, the world is a bale of banknotes in circulation; for most young men, it is a woman; for some women, it is a man; and for others it may be a salon, a coterie, a part of town or a whole city.
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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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Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.
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Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.
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A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.