Honore de Balzac Quotes
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How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
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Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.
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White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.
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Six weeks with a fever is an eternity.
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First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
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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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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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Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.
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Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.
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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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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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Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts.
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The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm.
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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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There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances.
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How can we explain the perpetuity of envy--a vice which yields no return?
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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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Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.
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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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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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The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.