Honoré de Balzac Quotes

If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.

Who would not at the present moment wish to retain the persuasion that wives are virtuous? Are they not the supreme flower of the country? Are they not all blooming creatures, fascinating the world by their beauty, their youth, their life and their love? To believe in their virtue is a sort of social religion, for they are the ornament of the world, and form the chief glory of France.

We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.

Les villes se relèvent aussi difficilement que les maisons de commerce de leur ruine.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

საზოგადოებრივი აზრი? - ეს ხომ ყოველ მეძავ ქალზე უფრო გარყვნილი არსებაა.

Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.

В самом деле, не ошибается ли тот, кто воображает, что чувства умирают и рождаются вновь? Возникнув, они живут вечно в глубине нашего сердца. Они дремлют и пробуждаются по воле случая; но навсегда остаются в душе и меняют ее.

The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.

Loneliness is emptiness; and moral nature has as much horror of it as physical nature. Solitude is habitable only for the man of genius who fills it with his ideas — daughters of the spiritual world — or for the beholder of divine works who finds it illuminated by the day of heaven, animated by the breath and by the voice of God. Save these two men, so close to paradise, loneliness is to torture what morale is to physique. Between loneliness and torture there is all the difference between nervous illness and surgical illness. It is suffering multiplied by infinity. The body touches infinity through the nervous system, just as the mind enters it through thought.

True love is eternal, infinite, always like unto itself; it is equable, pure, without violent demonstration; white hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.