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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Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
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What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
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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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Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.
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Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.
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The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.
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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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The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
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The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
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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...
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Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims.
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[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.
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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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The prodigality of millionaires is comparable only to their greed of gain. Let some whim or passion seize them and money is of no account. In fact these Croesuses find whims and passions harder to come by than gold.
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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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Love is a game in which one always cheats.
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Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.
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Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.
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God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the solitary, thoughtful seeker.
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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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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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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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Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.