Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Love is a game in which one always cheats.
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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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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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An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
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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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Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
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Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man.
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It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it.
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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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When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.
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Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.
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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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A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
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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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Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
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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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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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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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A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste.
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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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There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances.
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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 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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One hour of love has a whole life in it.