Quotes by
Honoré de Balzac |
1799-1850 , French writer
French novelist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form of the novel and is generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all time and one of the founders of realism in European literature.Eugénie Grandet (1833) was his first best-seller. Le Père Goriot (1835) and La Cousine Bette (1848) are some of his other famous novels.
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Quotations
| • | Our greatest fears lie in anticipation. 12 |
| • | How natural it is to destroy what we cannot possess, to deny what we do not understand, and to insult what we envy! 10 |
| • | Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman! 9 |
| • | My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, “Serve all, love one.” 7 |
| • | Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine. 7 |
| • | The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done. 6 |
| • | Time is the only capital of those who just have their intelligence as fortune. 6 |
| • | Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact. 5 |
| • | 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. 5 |
| • | Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt. 5 |
| • | An old man is a man who has dined and who watches others eat. 5 |
| • | No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife. 4 |
| • | There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power. 4 |
| • | Most men of action believe in fate and most men of thought believe in prudence. 4 |
| • | Fame is poison, so we must take it in small doses. 4 |
| • | It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action. 3 |
| • | Thinking is seeing... all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things. |
| • | Glory is the sun of the dead. |
| • | Men are like that, they can resist sound argument, yet yield to a glance. |
| • | When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues. |
| • | People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are. |
| • | Manners are the hypocrisy of nations. |
| • | The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament. |
| • | It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time. |
| • | The more we judge, the less we love. |
| • | When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa. |
| • | “I will succeed!” The word of the gambler, of the great captain, a fatalistic word which loses more men than it saves. |
| • | Man dies in despair while the Spirit dies in ecstasy. |
| • | Lovers have a way of using this word “nothing” which implies exactly the opposite. |
| • | The provinces are provinces; they are only ridiculous when they mimic Paris. |
| • | Whoever talks too much wants to deceive. |
| • | A mother, who is really a mother, is never free. |
| • | When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt. |
| • | Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance. |
| • | Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies. |
| • | Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. |
| • | Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives. |
| • | Woman is closer to angels than man, because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion. |
| • | Where poverty ceases, greed begins. |
| • | A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea. |
| • | Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with an iron will. |
| • | People who are in love suspect nothing or everything. |
| • | The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness. |
| • | Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Life is simply what out feelings do to us. |
| • | Those who spend too fast never grow rich. |
| • | Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought. |
| • | Jobs are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences. |
| • | Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: routine. |
| • | Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune. |
| • | A woman must be a genius to create a good husband. |
| • | Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything. |
| • | In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls. |
| • | Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness. |
| • | In a world of hunchbacks, a fine figure becomes a monstrosity. |
| • | Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness. |
| • | An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity. |
| • | Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally. |
| • | Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves! |
| • | We should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul. |
| • | Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness. |
| • | A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness. |
| • | Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other. |
| • | Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. |
| • | Reading brings us unknown friends. |
| • | Happiness depends on courage and work. |
| • | I am not deep, but I am very wide. |
| • | The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin. |
| • | Generous people make bad merchants. |
| • | Great people are always wrong to joke with their inferiors. The joke is a game, and the game supposes equality. |
| • | People value you for your usefulness, regardless of your worth. |
| • | The woman is a lyre who only reveals her secrets to those who know how to play. |
| • | It is a sign of mediocrity to be incapable of enthusiasm. |
| • | A husband, like a government, should never confess wrongdoing. |
| • | Joy can only spring up among people who feel equal. |
| • | In love, there is always one who suffers and another who is bored. |
| • | France is a country that loves to change government as long as it’s always the same. |
| • | People who strongly want something are almost always well served by chance. |
| • | For the journalist, whatever is probable is true. |
| • | Coquetry only goes well to the happy woman. |
| • | The police and the Jesuits have the virtue of never abandoning their enemies or their friends. |
| • | A husband should always know what his wife has, because she always knows what she doesn’t have. |
| • | Newspapers are the brothel of thought. |
| • | Repentance is the last sin of women. |
| • | If the Press did not exist, we would not have to invent it. |
| • | Kings and women believe that everything that happens is due to them. |
| • | One must always do well what one does, even if it is something crazy. |
| • | A woman shows her ass faster than her heart. |
