Honore de Balzac Quotes
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A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
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As a rule, only the poor are generous.
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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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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
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Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes.
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The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.
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To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions.
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Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
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Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
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In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.
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Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
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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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Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
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Reading brings us unknown friends.
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Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.
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Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire.
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He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.
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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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No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.
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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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The union of a want and a sentiment.
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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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Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.
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Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.