Honore de Balzac Quotes - Page 24

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• Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Work, Men

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• The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule.

  Honore de Balzac

  Spirit, Rebellious, Rebellion

  "'Catherine de Medici expliquée' ('About Catherine of Medici')". Book by Honoré de Balzac, 1843.

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• Let nothing dupe you! Such is the horrible maxim that acts as a solvent upon every noble feeling man experiences.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Stupidity, Feelings

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• The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.

  Honore de Balzac

  Self, Self Love, Turns

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• To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

  Honore de Balzac

  Funny, Money, Tired

  Honore de Balzac (2014). “Poor Relations: Cousin Betty and Cousin Pons”, p.772, The Floating Press

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• All human beings go through a previous life... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?

  Honore de Balzac

  Spiritual, Silence, Heaven

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

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Selfish, Passion

  "Letters of Two Brides". Book by Honoré de Balzac, 1841-1842.

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• At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

  Honore de Balzac

  Beauty, Promise, Literature

  "A Daughter of Eve". Book by Honoré de Balzac, 1839.

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• 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.

  Honore de Balzac

  Heart, Character, Maturity

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• Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Yield, Order

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• The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.

  Honore de Balzac

  Art, Lying, Secret

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• Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Passion, Vanity

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• 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.

  Honore de Balzac

  Girl, Angel, Forgiving

  Honore de Balzac (2015). “Father Goriot”, p.92, Library of Alexandria

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• You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.

  Honore de Balzac

  Girl, Men, Devil

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• He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.

  Honore de Balzac

  Funny, Dog, Reading

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• A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.

  Honore de Balzac

  Heart, Despair, Costumes

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• A sick man, surrounded by those who love him, nursed by those who wish earnestly that he should live, will recover (all other things being equal), when another patient tended by hirelings will die. Doctors decline to see unconscious magnestism in this phenomenon; for them it is the result of intelligent nursing, of exact obedience to their orders; but many a mother knows the virtue of such ardent projections of strong, unceasing prayer.

  Honore de Balzac

  Mother, Strong, Prayer

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• For young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds.

  Honore de Balzac

  People, Mind, Noble

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• Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal.

  Honore de Balzac

  Soul, Sorrow, Bed

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• Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.

  Honore de Balzac

  Smile, Motherhood, Tears

  Honore de Balzac (2011). “Letters of Two Brides”, p.171, The Floating Press

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• 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.

  Honore de Balzac

  Half, Want, Comfort

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• The election of a deputy to the Legislature offers a noble and majestic spectacle comparable only to the delivery of a child. It involves the same efforts, the same impurities, the same laceration, and the same triumph.

  Honore de Balzac

  Children, Effort, Majestic

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• A vocation is born to us all; happily most of us meet promptly our twin,--occupation.

  Honore de Balzac

  Occupation, Twins, Born

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• Thinking is seeing.... 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.

  Honore de Balzac

  Art, Science, Thoughtful

  Honore De Balzac (2011). “Louis Lambert”, p.36, The Floating Press

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• There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.

  Honore de Balzac

  Book, Thinking, Skeletons

  Honore de Balzac (2009). “Eugenie Grandet”, p.5, The Floating Press

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