Honore de Balzac Quotes
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It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
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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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A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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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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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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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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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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What is art? Nature concentrated.
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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
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Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
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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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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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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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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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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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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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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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A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.
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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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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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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.
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While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.
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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.