Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.
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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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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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By resorting to self-resignation, the unfortunate consummate.
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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.
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To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.
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Man is no match for woman where mischief reigns.
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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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Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
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We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing.
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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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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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In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.
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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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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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Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.
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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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Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
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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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Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
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The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.