Honore de Balzac Quotes
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A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
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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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The union of a want and a sentiment.
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Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.
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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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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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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
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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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All happiness depends on courage and work.
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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 monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.
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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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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.
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A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
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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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Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
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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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The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.
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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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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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Reading brings us unknown friends.