Honore de Balzac Quotes
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We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
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Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
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An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.
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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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Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire.
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Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.
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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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The first thing necessary to win the heart of a woman is opportunity.
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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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Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.
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The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical.
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To lese-majeste and contempt of court, we must add the crime of lese-million, that fearful indignity we visit on the rich when we expose the impotence of gold.
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Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
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Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.
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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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Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.
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To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.
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People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.
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The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
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Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
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All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
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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.