Honoré de Balzac Quotes

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

Paris that eternal monstrous marvel … the city of a hundred-thousand novels … a living creature, the great courtesan whose face and heart and mind-boggling morals they know: “They” are the lovers of Paris.

Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.

There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought

A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.

Reading brings us unknown friends

Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?

Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?

Se ciascuno pensa solo a se stesso e non si fida che di se stesso, come volete che ci sia coraggio civile, dal momento che questa virtù si basa sulla rinuncia a se stessi? Coraggio civile e coraggio militare nascono dallo stesso principio. Voi siete chiamati a dare la vostra vita in un sol momento, la nostra si consuma a goccia a goccia. Da entrambe le parti è la stessa lotta, sotto forme diverse. Non basta essere onesti per far progredire il più piccolo paese, bisogna anche essere preparati; senza contare che istruzione, onestà, amor di patria non valgono niente se non c'è la ferma volontà di trascurare ogni interesse personale per dedicarsi al pubblico bene

for a woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

Journalism, look you, is the religion of modern society.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.

Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started.

To provoke laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.

We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience

There are moments in life when all that we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us our wounds would wince at consoling words that would reveal the depths of our pain.

In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.

And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

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.

Here comes Mamma Vauquerr, fair as a starrr; and strung up like a bunch of carrots. Aren't we suffocating ourselves a wee bit?' he asked, placing a hand on the top of her corset. 'A bit of a crush in the vestibule, here, Mamma! If we start crying, there'll be an explosion. Never mind, I'll be there to collect the bits--just like an antiquary.''Now, there's the language of true French gallantry,' murmured Madame Vauquer in an aside to Madame Couture.

The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times.

Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.

For avarice begins where poverty ends.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

Some troubles like a protested note of a solvent debtor bear interest.

If we could but paint with the hand as we see with the eye!

Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.

Believe everything you hear said of the world nothing is too impossibly bad.

Love is the poetry of the senses!

He became...the ideal of that virtue which delights in its own work...doing everything with simplicity and dignity, for he seemed to realize that his objective added nobility to everything he did.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

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

He looked like some plant bleached by darkness.

-Хүү минь, чи надад ямар ч өргүй гэж бодож явах эрхийг би чамд олголоо.

A man like you is a god, not just a machine covered with skin, but a theater where fine feelings sprout and grow-and feelings are all that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Is a feeling anything but an entire world poured into a thought?

Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.

No one was irritable; we have never known anyone to remain unhappy while digesting a good meal. We enjoy lingering in a becalmed state, a kind of midpoint between the reverie of a thinker and the contentment of a cud-chewing animal, a state that should be termed the physical melancholy of gastronomy.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

The more a man judges, the less he loves

The more he saw, the more he doubted. He watched men narrowly, and saw how, beneath the surface, courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men.t‘What a cold-blooded jest!’ said he to himself. ‘It was not devised by a God.’tFrom that time forth he renounced a better world, and never uncovered himself when a Name was pronounced, and for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions envy is only moved to malice.

He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"--the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved.

Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress.Many men desire to have these two editions of the same work, although it is proof of deep inferiority in a man if he cannot make his wife his mistress. Seeking variety is a sign of impotence.

Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of pleasure.

Was she acting entirely consciously? No: women are always sincere, even in the midst of their most shocking duplicities, because it is always some natural emotion which dominates them. Perhaps, having given this young man such a hold on her, by having openly demonstrated her affection for him, Delphine was merely responding to a sense of personal dignity, which led her either to revoke any concessions she might have made or, at least, to enjoy suspending them. Even at the very moment when passion seizes her, it is perfectly natural for a Parisian woman to delay her final fall, as a way of testing the heart of the man into whose hands she is about to deliver herself and her future!

Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.

Poverty has in its favour an exquisite sleep filled with beautiful dreams.

Modesty is the conscience of the body.