Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.
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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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He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.
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Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts.
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Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.
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Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.
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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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The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.
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Life cannot go on without much forgetting.
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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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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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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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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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A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
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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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Man is no match for woman where mischief reigns.
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When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary.
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Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.
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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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How can we explain the perpetuity of envy--a vice which yields no return?
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The election of a deputy to the Legislature offers a noble and majestic spectacle comparable only to the delivery of a child. It involves the same efforts, the same impurities, the same laceration, and the same triumph.
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In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.