Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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.
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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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Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.
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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.
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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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There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.
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Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.
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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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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.
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If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
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Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.
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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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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.
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Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.
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The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
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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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Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
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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 sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
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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.
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Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
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Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.