Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.
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A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.
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Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
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The happier a man, the more apt he is to tremble. In hearts exclusively tender, anxiety and jealousy are in exact proportion to happiness.
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There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
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The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
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All human power is a compound of time and patience.
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Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God.
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Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues.
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As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.
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When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
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The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
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Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.
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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
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It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.