Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.
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Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.
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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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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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There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.
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Beaucoup d'hommes ont un orgueil qui les pousse a' cacher leurs combats et a' ne se montrer que victorieux. Many men have pride that causes them to hide their combats and to only show themselves victorious.
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Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.
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What is art? Nature concentrated.
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The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
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A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
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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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No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale.
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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.
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Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.
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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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We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.
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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
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Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over 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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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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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.