Honore de Balzac Quotes
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God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the solitary, thoughtful seeker.
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Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
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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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Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.
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True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
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Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
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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.
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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.
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A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
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Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
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Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.
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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.
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A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
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I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
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In all lands, sailors form a race apart. They profess a congenital contempt for landlubbers. As for the tradesman, he understands nothing of sailors nor cares a fig about them. He is content to rob them if he can.
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Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.
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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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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.
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Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
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A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
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A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur.