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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By resorting to self-resignation, the unfortunate consummate.
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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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To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.
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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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We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.
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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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When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.
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One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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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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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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First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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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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There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances.
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Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.
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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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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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Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.
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Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.
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Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.