Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.
-
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.
-
With monuments as with men, position means everything.
-
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.
-
Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
-
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
-
A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.
-
Beaucoup d'hommes ont un orgueil qui les pousse a' cacher leurs combats et a' ne se montrer que victorieux. Many men have pride that causes them to hide their combats and to only show themselves victorious.
-
A courage which looks easy & yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons - the least rewarded of all forms of courage.
-
Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.
-
At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
-
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.
-
The duration of a couple's passion is in proportion to the woman's original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.
-
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
-
We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment.
-
Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.
-
In Paris, the greatest expression of personal satisfaction known to man is the smirk on the face of a male, highly pleased with himself as he leaves the boudoir of a lady.
-
Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.
-
Temperament is the thermometer of character.
-
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
-
The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.
-
Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.
-
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?
-
The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.