Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.
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By resorting to self-resignation, the unfortunate consummate.
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Man is no match for woman where mischief reigns.
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Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
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To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.
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Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.
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We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The cannon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor, and reign at the universities; but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.
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We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.
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Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man's appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.
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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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Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
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The innocence of virgins is like milk which turns when exposed to a clap of thunder, to a tart smell, to a hot day, to the merest nothing.
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Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
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The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
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It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.
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One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.
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Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
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Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.
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This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fault for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice.
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Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it.
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.