Honoré de Balzac

The more one judges, the less one loves.

Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?,Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

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

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

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.

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

Glory is the sunshine of the dead,Love is the poetry of the senses!,Вера в себя способна творить такие же чудеса, как вера в Господа Бога.

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

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

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

Reading brings us unknown friends,Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!,He looked like some plant bleached by darkness.

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.

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

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.

Lucien took the cigar and lit it, in the Spanish fashion, from that of the priest. "He is right," Lucien thought; "there is plenty of time to kill myself.

For avarice begins where poverty ends.

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.

Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.

Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.

No one was irritable; we have never known anyone to remain unhappy while digesting a good meal. We enjoy lingering in a becalmed state, a kind of midpoint between the reverie of a thinker and the contentment of a cud-chewing animal, a state that should be termed the physical melancholy of gastronomy.

Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress. Many men desire to have these two editions of the same work, although it is proof of deep inferiority in a man if he cannot make his wife his mistress. Seeking variety is a sign of impotence.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.

Of necessity she went further in aversion than she had gone in love, for her hatred was not in proportion to her love but to her disappointed hopes.

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"--the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved.

He became. . . the ideal of that virtue which delights in its own work. . . doing everything with simplicity and dignity, for he seemed to realize that his objective added nobility to everything he did.

We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience,There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them. If there were principles and fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts and a man can not be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.

Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.

The more a man judges, the less he loves,Necessity is often the spur to genius.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

All happiness depends on courage and work.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

Some troubles like a protested note of a solvent debtor bear interest.

There are moments in life when all that we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us our wounds would wince at consoling words that would reveal the depths of our pain.

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

All happiness depends on courage and work.

Hope is a light diet but very stimulating.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

To provoke laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.

Modesty is the conscience of the body.

Necessity is often the spur to genius.

Envy is the most stupid of vices for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.

If we could but paint with the hand as we see with the eye!,A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion history romance and art would be useless.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions envy is only moved to malice.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

True love is eternal infinite and always like itself. It is equal and pure without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

True love is eternal infinite and always like itself. It is equal and pure without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness but with energy and above all with illusions I pulled through them all.

Believe everything you hear said of the world nothing is too impossibly bad.

Our worst misfortunes never happen and most miseries lie in anticipation.

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.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!,A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

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

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

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

Power is action the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

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

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion it is a joy of every moment.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

A young bride is like a plucked flower but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over. .