Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.
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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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Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
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Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.
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Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
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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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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
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Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.
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Love is a game in which one always cheats.
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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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God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the solitary, thoughtful seeker.
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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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The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
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Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.
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But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
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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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Women themselves are so happy, and so beautiful, when they're strong, that they naturally choose powerful men, even if that power's so enermous there's a real risk it could shatter them.
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Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking .. questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world.
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If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
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One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.