Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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 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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Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
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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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To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.
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We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.
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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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One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.
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Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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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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What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
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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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When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.
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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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For a sick man the world begins at his pillow and ends at the foot of his bed.
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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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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.
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Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.
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The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
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Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.
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Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.
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Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.