Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.
-
We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.
-
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.
-
Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.
-
Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.
-
It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.
-
Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.
-
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.
-
Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
-
Behind every fortune there is a crime.
-
Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.
-
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
-
Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
-
No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale.
-
I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
-
A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
-
If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
-
What is art? Nature concentrated.
-
Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.
-
Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.
-
Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.
-
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.
-
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
-
Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.