Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
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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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Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.
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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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When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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For businessmen, the world is a bale of banknotes in circulation; for most young men, it is a woman; for some women, it is a man; and for others it may be a salon, a coterie, a part of town or a whole city.
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Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers.
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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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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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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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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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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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I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
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Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
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Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.
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A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
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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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Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.
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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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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.