Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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.
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Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
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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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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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Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
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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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Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.
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Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.
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Love is a game in which one always cheats.
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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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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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Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.
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Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
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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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Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.
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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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God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the solitary, thoughtful seeker.
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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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What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
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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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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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For a sick man the world begins at his pillow and ends at the foot of his bed.
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Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.