Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
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.
-
Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
-
Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.
-
The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
-
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.
-
Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes.
-
Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
-
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.
-
There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.
-
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.
-
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
-
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.
-
A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
-
Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.
-
Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
-
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.
-
What is art? Nature concentrated.
-
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
-
The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?
-
A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.
-
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.
-
What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.
-
A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
-
By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.