Top 676 Quotes & Sayings by Honore de Balzac - Page 3

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.

An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.

To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.

Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.

People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.

A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.

Life is simply what out feelings do to us.

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman!

He who best knows the world will love it least.

Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.

The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.

A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.

If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.

Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman.

A courage which looks easy & yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons - the least rewarded of all forms of courage.

No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.

The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.

Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.

Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.

No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.

A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.

If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.

Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.

As a rule, only the poor are generous.

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

Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.

One hour of love has a whole life in it.

Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy--a vice which yields no return?

Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire.

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

All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

It is quite right what they say: the three most beautiful sights in the world are a ship in full sail, a galloping horse, and a woman dancing.

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.

It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.

Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.

As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative.

Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing.

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

The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

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.

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

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.

Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion.

Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.

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.

Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man's appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.

Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right.

Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.

Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.

The first thing necessary to win the heart of a woman is opportunity.

The more you judge, the less you love.