Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Once she has committed sin, there is nothing left for the Protestant woman, whereas the Catholic Church, hope of forgiveness makes a woman sublime.
-
An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.
-
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
-
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.
-
The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.
-
What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
-
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
-
Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
-
One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.
-
Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
-
Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.
-
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
-
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
-
Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.
-
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.
-
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
-
Coffee falls into the stomach... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink...
-
Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims.
-
Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.