Honore de Balzac Quotes
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How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
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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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To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
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Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
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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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Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.
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What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
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Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.
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One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.
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The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
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A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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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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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.
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A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.
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To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.
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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 national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
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Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.