Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.
-
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.
-
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
-
Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.
-
Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.
-
Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.
-
Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
-
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...
-
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
-
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
-
How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
-
Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.
-
Once she has committed sin, there is nothing left for the Protestant woman, whereas the Catholic Church, hope of forgiveness makes a woman sublime.
-
A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry.
-
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.
-
There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.
-
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.
-
Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
-
Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.
-
True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
-
Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
-
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
-
To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
-
Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.