Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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 society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.
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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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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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Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.
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Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
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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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Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.
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A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.
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Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire.
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As a rule, only the poor are generous.
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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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It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.
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A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.
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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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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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A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.
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Reading brings us unknown friends.
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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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Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.
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A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.
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The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.
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Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.
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Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.