The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
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 BalzacWe do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing.
Honore de Balzac