Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
Honore de BalzacTo 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.
Honore de BalzacThere are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.
Honore de BalzacOn the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts.
Honore de BalzacWho shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?
Honore de BalzacOne admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.
Honore de Balzac