Top 676 Quotes & Sayings by Honore de Balzac - Page 8

Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.

Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts.

Grief ennobles the commonest people because it has its own essential grandeur. To shine with the luster of grief, a person need only be sincere.

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

People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.

For the person who loves God, worship is the daily bread of patience.

It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.

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.

A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.

Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.

Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.

Sensuality is the death of the soul.

White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.

When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.

Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.

Love knows nothing of modesty.

Nos beaux sentiments ne sont-ils pas les poe sies de la volonte ? Aren't our best feelings poetry of the will?

Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.

Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God

L'amour n'est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.

All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.

It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.

Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.

Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.

To lese-majeste and contempt of court, we must add the crime of lese-million, that fearful indignity we visit on the rich when we expose the impotence of gold.

A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.

True love rules especially through memory.

According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.

Vivacity is the health of the spirit.

The future of a nation lies in the hands of mothers.

You may imitate, but never counterfeit.

Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another.

The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share.

I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.

Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.

For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?

The union of a want and a sentiment.

The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.

Only when one has learned to acknowledge that wiser minds have made better words to come out of our mouths may we truly, then, begin to speak them.

Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.

They ended as all great passions do end - by a misunderstanding.

Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.

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

Women themselves are so happy, and so beautiful, when they're strong, that they naturally choose powerful men, even if that power's so enermous there's a real risk it could shatter them.

With monuments as with men, position means everything.

The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.

Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.

Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking; love has found.

The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.

In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is.

Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.

With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.

Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues.

When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?

Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.

Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.

The duration of a couple's passion is in proportion to the woman's original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.

Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.