Quotes from balzac honore de ii

Old men alone have time to love; young men are rowing ... the galleys of ambition.

Friendship is the bond between a pair of kindred souls, united in their strength, and yet independent. Let us be friends and comrades to bear jointly the burden of life.

They who listen to only one bell hear only one sound.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.

This chatterer believed himself an orator.

It is not in mere sport that Paris has been called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire, everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights up again, with shooting sparks, and is consumed.

Humanity rolls out like a many-colored ribbon. See the diverse shades of that flower of the celestial gardens.

Vinet gave his wife the terrible, fixed, cold look with which men enforce their absolute dominion. The hapless helot, punished incessantly for not having the one thing that was wanted of her, a fortune, took up her cards.

But the maladies by which a man is afflicted do not nullify the sum total of human passion. To our shame be it spoken, a woman is never so much attached to us as when we are sick.

The man who hastens to tell another man that he has dropped a thousand franc bill from his pocket-book, or even that the handkerchief is coming out of his pocket, would think it a mean thing to warn him that some one was carrying off his wife.

Really, his self-sufficiency is too much. I can't stand that Jupiter Olympian air of his--the only mythological character exempt, they say, from ill-luck.

Half of Paris sleeps amidst the putrid exhalations of courts and streets and sewers.

Judged from a literary point of view, Nathan lacks style and cultivation. Like most young men, ambitious of literary fame, he disgorges to-day what he acquired yesterday.

I don't say they love, my dear, but they are forced to lodge somewhere, like other men, and when they haven't a home of their own they lodge with their mistresses; which may seem to you rather loose, but it is far more agreeable than lodging in a prison.