Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire.
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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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A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.
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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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A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.
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Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.
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The union of a want and a sentiment.
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Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
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Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
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Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true.
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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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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
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Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
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Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.
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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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The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.
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In a world of hunchbacks, a fine figure becomes a monstrosity.
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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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A lui la foi, a' elle le doute, a' elle le fardeau le plus lourd: la femme ne souffre-t-elle pas toujours pour deux? For him, faith; for her, doubt and for her theheavier load: does not the woman always suffer for both?
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The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.
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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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Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
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Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.
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For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?