Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.
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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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There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.
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Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts.
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Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.
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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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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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Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.
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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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Life cannot go on without much forgetting.
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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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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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A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
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Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.
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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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When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary.
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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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How can we explain the perpetuity of envy--a vice which yields no return?
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Man is no match for woman where mischief reigns.
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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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In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.
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The great secret of social alchemy is to profit best from each stage in our lives, to gather all its leaves in spring, all its flowers in summer, and all its fruits in autumn.