Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
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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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The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
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Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.
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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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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it.
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Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.
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A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
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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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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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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
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Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
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To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.
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The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
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Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
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A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
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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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To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
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Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
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The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.
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The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.
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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.