Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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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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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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A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
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Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.
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Reading brings us unknown friends.
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Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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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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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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The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
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A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
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A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
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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?
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Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
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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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Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.
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Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
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A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.
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To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
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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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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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All happiness depends on courage and work.