Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
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A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.
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A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
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Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.
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A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
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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.
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We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing.
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If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.
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Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
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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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All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.
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Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.
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Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
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There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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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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There are words which cut like steel.
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The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
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There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
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Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
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Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.
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Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.
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People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.
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[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.
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A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.