Honore de Balzac Quotes

Vulgar souls look hastily and superficially at the sea and accuse it of monotony; other more privileged beings could spend a lifetime admiring it and discovering new and changing phenomena that delight them. So it is with love.

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

Lovers have a way of using this word "nothing" which implies exactly the opposite.

Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret.

Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.

God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.

The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.

He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.

We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.

Equality may be the law, but no human power can install it.

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry.

A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.

Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.

I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.

[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.

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.

To say to a rich man: You are poor! is to tell the Archbishop of Granada that his sermons are worthless.

There 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.

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.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.

You may imitate, but never counterfeit.

A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.

Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.

Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

Heaven should be kind to stupid people, for no one else can be consistently.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.

When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.

A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.

We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.

It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.

Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.

Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.

Passion is born deaf and dumb.

Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks.

An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.