Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Love is a game in which one always cheats.
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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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Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.
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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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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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True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
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Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
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A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
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Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
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You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
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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 married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
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Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.
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Resignation is a daily suicide.
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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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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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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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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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Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
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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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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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[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.
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An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
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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.