Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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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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One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.
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To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.
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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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What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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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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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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For a sick man the world begins at his pillow and ends at the foot of his bed.
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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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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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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Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.
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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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We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.
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Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.
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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 the most melodious of all harmonies.
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A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry.