Honore de Balzac Quotes
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A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
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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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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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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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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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Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance.
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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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The union of a want and a sentiment.
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The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.
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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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A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
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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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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 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 response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.
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Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.
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Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues.
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Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.
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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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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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The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.
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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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If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.