Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
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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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A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
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What is art? Nature concentrated.
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To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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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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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.
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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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Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.
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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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Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
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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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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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A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.
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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.
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While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.
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Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues.
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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.