Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
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The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
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Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
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A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
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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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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
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Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
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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.
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Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?
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Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
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True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
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A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
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At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
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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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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.
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We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment.
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What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.
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A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry.
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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.
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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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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.