Honoré de Balzac Quotes

Virtue will cut your head off, vice will only cut your hair.

Il y a deux timidités : la timidité d’esprit, la timidité de nerfs ; une timidité physique et une timidité morale. L’une est indépendante de l’autre. Le corps peut avoir peur et trembler pendant que l’esprit reste calme et courageux, et vice versa. Ceci donne la clef de bien des bizarreries morales. Quand les deux timidités se réunissent chez un homme, il sera nul pendant toute sa vie.

Pierrette, like all those who suffer more than they have strength to bear, kept silence.Silence is the only weapon by which such victims can conquer; it baffles the Cossack charges of envy, the savage skirmishings of suspicion; it does at times give victory, crushing and complete, — for what is more complete than silence? it is absolute; it is one of the attributes of infinity.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

All happiness depends on courage and work.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Paris that eternal monstrous marvel … the city of a hundred-thousand novels … a living creature, the great courtesan whose face and heart and mind-boggling morals they know: “They” are the lovers of Paris.

However the three classes of beings created by the manners are: The man who works; The man who thinks;
The man who does nothing.

Karşılık görmemiş duygular bazı ruhlarda kin haline gelir, bende ise öyle olmadı; yoğunlaştı bu duygular içimde, bir yer etti kendine, sonra da oradan hayatıma fışkırdı.

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

If you decide to join up with me, I want it to be because you're making a rational choice, not because you've been pushed by passion or despair.

Aucun homme ne s'arrache aux douceurs du sommeil matinal pour écouter un troubadour en veste, une fille seule se réveille à un chant d'amour.

Persons without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within.

Thinking is seeing, said he one day, carried away by some objection raised as to the first principles of our organisation. Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.