Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
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Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
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Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
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A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
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You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
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What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.
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The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
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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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A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
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A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual. Misfortune is a stepping stone for a genius, a piscina for a Christian, a treasure for a man of parts, and an abyss for a weakling.
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Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.
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This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.
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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.
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A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
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Resignation is a daily suicide.
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For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.
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White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light.
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When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.
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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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Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.
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One hour of love has a whole life in it.
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Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.
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Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.