Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.
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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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When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
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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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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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When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
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According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.
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A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
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A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
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An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
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A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
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By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.
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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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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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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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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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A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste.
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Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.
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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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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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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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She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.
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A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.