Honore de Balzac Quotes
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The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.
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Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.
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To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
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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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It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.
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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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Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
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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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We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.
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Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.
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Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
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When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary.
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In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.
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A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
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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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Once she has committed sin, there is nothing left for the Protestant woman, whereas the Catholic Church, hope of forgiveness makes a woman sublime.
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No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.
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To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.
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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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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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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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An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.
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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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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.