Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.
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A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
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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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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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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
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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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Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
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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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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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If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
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A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
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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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Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.
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Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
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A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life.
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In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.
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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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If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
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I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.