Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
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It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show 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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A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste.
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A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
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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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We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
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The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.
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Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.
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You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.
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If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
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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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Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.
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The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
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A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
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One hour of love has a whole life in it.
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Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
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A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
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Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
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Un homme n'a jamais pu e lever sa ma|"tresse jusqu'a' lui; mais une femme place toujours son amant aussi haut qu'elle. A man can never elevate his mistress to his rank, but a woman can always place her lover as high as she.
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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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Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
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A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
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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.