Honoré de Balzac Quotes

There are certain wives whose confinement makes sarcastic celibates smile.

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.

L'homme est imparfait. Il est parfois plus ou moins hypocrite, et les niais disent alors qu'il a ou n'a pas de mœurs.

Life — is it anything more than a machine to which money imparts the motion?

Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colours employed in painting.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Il faisait le ménage comme Philopémen sciait son bois, en communiquant à toutes ses actions la simplicité du faire, en y gardant sa dignité, car il semblait comprendre que le but ennoblissait tout.

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

However, she wouldn't be the first person to mistrust her nearest and dearest yet confide in the first stranger who comes along: a strange but true quirk of behaviour, whose root is easily traced to the human heart. Some people perhaps have nothing left to gain from those they live with; having revealed the emptiness of their souls, they secretly feel themselves to be judged with deserved severity; however, as they have a powerful craving for the flattery they need but lack, or a burning desire to appear to possess qualities they do not have, they hope to take by surprise the heart and esteem of those who are strangers to them, at the risk of one day falling from grace.

one can no more hinder criticism than the use of eyes, tongues, and judgment.

A mother’s life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

Dans la vie morale, aussi bien que dans la vie physique, il existe une aspiration et une respiration; l’âme a besoin d’absorber les sentiments d’une autre âme, de se les assimiler pour les lui restituer plus riches. Sans ce beau phénomène humain, point de vie au cœur; l’air lui manque alors, il souffre et dépérit.

La province est la province : elle est ridicule quand elle veut singer Paris.

Love is like some fresh spring, that leaves its cresses, its gravel bed and flowers to become first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.

La lucidité, de même que les rayons du soleil, n’a d’effet que par la fixité de la ligne droite, elle ne devine qu’à la condition de ne pas rompre son regard ; elle se trouble dans les sautillements de la chance.