Honore de Balzac Quotes - Page 27

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• In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke.

  Honore de Balzac

  People, Cracks, Matter

  8 Copy quote

• 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?

  Honore de Balzac

  Strong, Stress, Moving

  4 Copy quote

• Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.

  Honore de Balzac

  Marriage, Party, Fighting

  4 Copy quote

• No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.

  Honore de Balzac

  Heart, Inferiority, Rivals

  4 Copy quote

• Ah! how much a mother learns from her child! The constant protection of a helpless being forces us to so strict an alliance with virtue, that a woman never shows to full advantage except as a mother. Then alone can her character expand in the fulfillment of all life's duties and the enjoyment of all its pleasures.

  Honore de Balzac

  Mother, Children, Character

  Honore de Balzac (2011). “Letters of Two Brides”, p.186, The Floating Press

  4 Copy quote

• Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted.

  Honore de Balzac

  Past, Icy, Snuff

  4 Copy quote

• To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.

  Honore de Balzac

  Marriage, Mother, Country

  6 Copy quote

• Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.

  Honore de Balzac

  Character, Men, Two

  4 Copy quote

• One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.

  Honore de Balzac

  Book, Men, July

  Honore de Balzac (1901). “Cousin Betty”, p.8, Library of Alexandria

  5 Copy quote

• What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.

  Honore de Balzac

  People, Judging, Crime

  4 Copy quote

• Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

  Honore de Balzac

  Heart, Exercise, Equality

  12 Copy quote

• A careful observation of Nature will disclose pleasantries of superb irony. She has for instance placed toads close to flowers.

  Honore de Balzac

  Nature, Flower, Toads

  7 Copy quote

• Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.

  Honore de Balzac

  Music, Two, Kind

  "Massimilla Doni" by Honore de Balzac, translated by Clara Bell and James Waring, 1839.

  4 Copy quote

• Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.

  Honore de Balzac

  Thinking, Thoughtful, Intuition

  6 Copy quote

• No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale.

  Honore de Balzac

  Dog, Art, Wind

  4 Copy quote

• It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

  Honore de Balzac

  Father, Men, Bakers

  8 Copy quote

• Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.

  Honore de Balzac

  Hatred, Giants, Journalism

  10 Copy quote

• The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Mind, Genius

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

  5 Copy quote

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