Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims.
-
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.
-
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
-
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
-
A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.
-
Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.
-
Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.
-
Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
-
Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.
-
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.
-
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...
-
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
-
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.
-
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
-
Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.
-
Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.
-
For a sick man the world begins at his pillow and ends at the foot of his bed.
-
The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
-
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.
-
God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the solitary, thoughtful seeker.
-
[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.
-
The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.
-
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.
-
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.