Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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?
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Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.
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In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.
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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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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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I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
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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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Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.
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When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.
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Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.
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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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Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.
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Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right.
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Reading brings us unknown friends.
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Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them.
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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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Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
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But woman brings disorder into society through passion.
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Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l'habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit.
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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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Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.
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Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
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Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
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On the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts.