Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance.
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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.
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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.
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The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.
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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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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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A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.
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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.
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The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.
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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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Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
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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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Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
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Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
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On the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts.
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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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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.
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Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
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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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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.
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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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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.