Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
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When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
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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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Only when one has learned to acknowledge that wiser minds have made better words to come out of our mouths may we truly, then, begin to speak them.
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I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
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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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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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Economized love is never real love.
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Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.
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It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
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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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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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When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.
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A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.
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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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Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.
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All human power is a compound of time and patience.
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Authentic love always assumes the mystery of modesty, even in its expression, because actions speak louder than words. Unlike a feigned love, it feels no need to set a conflagration.
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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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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.
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Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!
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Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.
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There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.
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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.