Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Life cannot go on without much forgetting.
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Necessity is the spur of genius.
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He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.
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Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.
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All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.
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From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.
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Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another.
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How can we explain the perpetuity of envy--a vice which yields no return?
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Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts.
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There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.
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Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.
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Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world--the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?
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Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.
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The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.
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Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.
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When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.
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I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me . . . to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.
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There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.
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Vulgar souls look hastily and superficially at the sea and accuse it of monotony; other more privileged beings could spend a lifetime admiring it and discovering new and changing phenomena that delight them. So it is with love.
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A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
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Gratitude is a fool's word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man.
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We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.
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Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival.
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When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary.