Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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 good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.
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Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
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When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
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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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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.
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Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
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While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.
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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.
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Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
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To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions.
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Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.
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Conventions are often more cruel than the law.
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Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
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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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The union of a want and a sentiment.
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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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The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.
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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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There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.
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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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If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.
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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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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.