Honore de Balzac Quotes - Page 23

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• My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.

  Honore de Balzac

  Writing, Tables, My Thoughts

  4 Copy quote

• Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.

  Honore de Balzac

  Moving, Secret, Affair

  7 Copy quote

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

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Passion, Vanity

  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

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

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Work, Men

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  15 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

• 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

• Does anyone know where these gondolas of Paris come from?
  [Fr., Ne sait on pas ou viennent ces gondoles Parisiennes?]

  Honore de Balzac

  Paris, Doe, Gondolas

  16 Copy quote

• The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Husband, Odes

  4 Copy quote

• In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.

  Honore de Balzac

  Horse, Knowledge, Medicine

  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

• In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become like women; their thoughts can revolve around the minor facts of life and penetrate their hidden meaning.

  Honore de Balzac

  Silence, Mind, Facts

  5 Copy quote

• As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.

  Honore de Balzac

  Simple, Men, Secret

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  8 Copy quote

• A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.

  Honore de Balzac

  Marriage, Vexation, Virtue

  4 Copy quote

• Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

  Honore de Balzac

  Fate, Blood, Political

  7 Copy quote

• Thought is the only treasure that God sets outside all power and keeps to serve as a secret link among the unhappy.

  Honore de Balzac

  Secret, Unhappy, Links

  4 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

• A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.

  Honore de Balzac

  Block, Believe, Men

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Pure herring oil is the port wine of English cats

  Honore de Balzac

  Wine, Cat, Oil

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 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

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

  Honore de Balzac

  Sympathy, Pain, Depth

  5 Copy quote

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