Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.
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Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.
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The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.
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A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.
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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
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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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There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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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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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
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Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance.
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What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?
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If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.
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Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
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Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.
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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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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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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.
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No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.
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According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.
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Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
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Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
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Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.
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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.