Honore de Balzac Quotes
-
Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.
-
A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
-
The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
-
Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
-
The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
-
[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.
-
True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
-
Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
-
I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
-
An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
-
You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.
-
One hour of love has a whole life in it.
-
Behind every fortune there is a crime.
-
Resignation is a daily suicide.
-
It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it.
-
For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.
-
If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
-
Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking .. questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world.
-
A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
-
The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.
-
A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.