Honore de Balzac Quotes
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When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.
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One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
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Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene. 'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.' 'And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer.
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For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.
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The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
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We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
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Resignation is a daily suicide.
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Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
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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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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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A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
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Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.
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When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
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Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.
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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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The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.
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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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There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
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You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.
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While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.
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It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been brought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.
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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.