Quotes By HONORE DE BALZAC
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.
When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
How natural it is to destroy what we cannot possess, to deny what we do not understand, and to insult what we envy!
True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.
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.
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.
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
The more one judges, the less one loves.
Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.
A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.
Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.
The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
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.
It is quite right what they say: the three most beautiful sights in the world are a ship in full sail, a galloping horse, and a woman dancing.
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.
Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.
As a rule, only the poor are generous.