Quotes from Honore de Balzac

Love is the poetry of the senses!

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.

Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

True love rules especially through memory.

Il ya toute une vie dans une heure d'amour.

Women themselves are so happy, and so beautiful, when they're strong, that they naturally choose powerful men, even if that power's so enermous there's a real risk it could shatter them.

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

Mais Paris est un véritable océan. Jetez-y la sonde, vous n'en connaîtrez jamais la profondeur. Parcourez-le, décrivez-le : quelque soin que vous mettiez à le parcourir, à le décrire ; quelques nombreux et intéressés que soient les explorateurs de cette mer, il s'y rencontrera toujours un lieu vierge, un antre inconnu, des fleurs, des perles, des monstres, quelque chose d'inouï, oublié par les plongeurs littéraires.

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

Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.

La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude est une belle chose.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

Life cannot go on without a great deal of forgetting.

Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.

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.

As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.

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.

We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.

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.

A man who prides himself on going in a straight line through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility.

One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.

I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore the ordinary rules of common-sense.