Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
-
Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.
-
The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.
-
Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.
-
The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.
-
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.
-
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
-
Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
-
I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.
-
Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
-
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?
-
We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.
-
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.
-
Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
-
A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.
-
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
-
Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.
-
Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
-
They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them.
-
Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
-
With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.
-
Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
-
The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
-
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.