Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.
-
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
-
Economized love is never real love.
-
Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!
-
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.
-
A husband and wife who are in the habit of occupying separate rooms are either beings apart, or they have found happiness. Either they hate or they adore each other.
-
A vocation is born to us all; happily most of us meet promptly our twin,--occupation.
-
By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.
-
Women themselves are so happy, and so beautiful, when they're strong, that they naturally choose powerful men, even if that power's so enermous there's a real risk it could shatter them.
-
Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.
-
The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.
-
Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.
-
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.
-
Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God.
-
The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.
-
Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.
-
As a rule, only the poor are generous.
-
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
-
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?
-
In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.
-
Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.
-
The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.
-
The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.
-
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?