Honoré De Balzac Quotes

The more one judges, the less one loves.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?

~ Honoré De Balzac

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

~ Honoré De Balzac

-Хүү минь, чи надад ямар ч өргүй гэж бодож явах эрхийг би чамд олголоо.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Se ciascuno pensa solo a se stesso e non si fida che di se stesso, come volete che ci sia coraggio civile, dal momento che questa virtù si basa sulla rinuncia a se stessi? Coraggio civile e coraggio militare nascono dallo stesso principio. Voi siete chiamati a dare la vostra vita in un sol momento, la nostra si consuma a goccia a goccia. Da entrambe le parti è la stessa lotta, sotto forme diverse. Non basta essere onesti per far progredire il più piccolo paese, bisogna anche essere preparati; senza contare che istruzione, onestà, amor di patria non valgono niente se non c'è la ferma volontà di trascurare ogni interesse personale per dedicarsi al pubblico bene

~ Honoré De Balzac

All happiness depends on courage and work.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.

~ Honoré De Balzac

And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.

~ Honoré De Balzac

A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.

~ Honoré De Balzac

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

~ Honoré De Balzac

Вера в себя способна творить такие же чудеса, как вера в Господа Бога.

~ Honoré De Balzac

The more he saw, the more he doubted. He watched men narrowly, and saw how, beneath the surface, courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men. ‘What a cold-blooded jest!’ said he to himself. ‘It was not devised by a God.’ From that time forth he renounced a better world, and never uncovered himself when a Name was pronounced, and for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art

~ Honoré De Balzac

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

~ Honoré De Balzac

However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?

~ Honoré De Balzac

Poverty has in its favour an exquisite sleep filled with beautiful dreams.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!

~ Honoré De Balzac

Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,--she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.

~ Honoré De Balzac

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

~ Honoré De Balzac

Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Parent may hinder their children's marriage, but children cannot interfere with the insane acts of their parents in their second childhood.

~ Honoré De Balzac

No one ought even to desert a woman after throwing her a heap of gold in her distress! He ought to love her forever! You are young, only twenty-one, and kind and upright and fine. You'll ask me how a woman can take money from a man. Oh, God, isn't it natural to share everything with the one we owe all our happiness to? When one has given everything, how can one quibble about a mere portion of it? Money is important only when feeling has ceased. Isn't one bound for life? How can you foresee separation when you think someone loves you? When a man swears eternal love--how can there be any separate concerns in that case?

~ Honoré De Balzac

Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.

~ Honoré De Balzac

The viscountess had raised the forefinger of her right hand and made a pretty gesture toward a stool at her feet. There was such intense tyrannical passion in the gesture that the marquis relinquished the doorknob and came back.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Journalism, look you, is the religion of modern society.

~ Honoré De Balzac

It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.

~ Honoré De Balzac

What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Was she acting entirely consciously? No: women are always sincere, even in the midst of their most shocking duplicities, because it is always some natural emotion which dominates them. Perhaps, having given this young man such a hold on her, by having openly demonstrated her affection for him, Delphine was merely responding to a sense of personal dignity, which led her either to revoke any concessions she might have made or, at least, to enjoy suspending them. Even at the very moment when passion seizes her, it is perfectly natural for a Parisian woman to delay her final fall, as a way of testing the heart of the man into whose hands she is about to deliver herself and her future!

~ Honoré De Balzac

He looked like some plant bleached by darkness.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Happy? asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity and terror. Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of pleasure.

~ Honoré De Balzac

How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene.'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.''And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?

~ Honoré De Balzac

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

~ Honoré De Balzac

Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.

~ Honoré De Balzac

For avarice begins where poverty ends.

~ Honoré De Balzac

The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.

~ Honoré De Balzac