Top 676 Quotes & Sayings by Honore de Balzac - Page 11

A careful observation of Nature will disclose pleasantries of superb irony. She has for instance placed toads close to flowers.

Nothing about me surprises me.

Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.

Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.

The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.

As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.

During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo.

A woman, even a prude, is not long at a loss, however dire her plight. She would seen always to have in hand the fig leaf our Mother Eve bequeathed to her.

To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.

Beaucoup d'hommes ont un orgueil qui les pousse a' cacher leurs combats et a' ne se montrer que victorieux. Many men have pride that causes them to hide their combats and to only show themselves victorious.

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

Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.

Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.

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

Does anyone know where these gondolas of Paris come from? [Fr., Ne sait on pas ou viennent ces gondoles Parisiennes?]

Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.

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

It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.

Imagination helps the realism of every detail, and only sees the beauties of the work.

A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.

The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.

Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense.

Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.

There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.

All human beings go through a previous life... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?

Love endows us with a sort of personal religion; we respect another live within ourselves.

When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she.

Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.

The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule.

In smart society men are jealous of one another after the fashion of women.

God is the author, men are only the players. These grand pieces which are played upon earth have been composed in heaven.

A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.

We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day.

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.

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.

When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.

Pity is woman's sweetest charm.

No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.

Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted.

Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.

Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.

No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale.

A knowledge of mankind and of things that surround us gives us that second education which proves far move valuable than our first because it alone turns out a truly accomplished man.

We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing.

Too great a display of delicacy can and does sometimes infringe upon de-cency.

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

Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.

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.

Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.

When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.

Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal.

Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.

There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances.

Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.

We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The cannon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor, and reign at the universities; but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.

In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.

Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.

All we are is in the soul.

I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.

He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.