Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.
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Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.
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There is something great and terrible about suicide.
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Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.
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Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
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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.
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All happiness depends on courage and work.
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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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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.
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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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The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.
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When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
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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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Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.
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The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
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Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?
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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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Economized love is never real love.
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All human power is a compound of time and patience.
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It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.
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With monuments as with men, position means everything.
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Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
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It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.