Quotes from balzac honore de xii

It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations.

Passions are as mean as they are cruel.

Men may weary by their constancy, but women never.

If men of imagination and good sense, like you, desert one camp only to join the other; if they cannot keep to the happy medium between two forms of extravagance, we shall always be exposed to the satire of the sophists, who deny all progress, who compare the genius of man to this tablecloth, which, being too short to cover the whole of Signor Giardini's table, decks one end at the expense of the other.

Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of all truths, all powers, all feelings.

Like an eagle darting on his prey, he took her utterly to him, set her on his knees, and felt with an indescribable intoxication the voluptuous pressure of this girl, whose richly developed beauties softly enveloped him.

A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.

How hungry one's heart gets!

What woman wants pity?... A man's sternness is to us our only pardon.

A woman's life begins with her first passion.

Do for God what you do for your ambitious projects, what you do in consecrating yourself to Art, what you have done when you loved a human creature or sought some secret of human science. Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry? Surely His riches are worthy of being coveted! His treasure is inexhaustible, His poem infinite, His love immutable, His science sure and darkened by no mysteries.

Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short.