Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
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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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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 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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We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.
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To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.
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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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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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First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.
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One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.
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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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Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.
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Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
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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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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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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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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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What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
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Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.
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Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.
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Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.