Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Love is a game in which one always cheats.
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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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Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
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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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A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.
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A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.
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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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Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
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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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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
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Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
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If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
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One hour of love has a whole life in it.
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Resignation is a daily suicide.
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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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Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
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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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Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
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What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.
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Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.
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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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The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.