Quotes from Honore de Balzac

Notre conscience est un juge infaillible, quand nous ne l'avons pas encore assassinée.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.

Happiness is the inner poetry of women, just as fine clothes are the mask of beauty

Notre coeur est un trésor, videz-le d'un coup, vous êtes ruinés.

We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience

Women always persuade men they have made into sheep that they are lions with a will of iron.

I had youth, beauty, two advantages conferred by chance, and of which we are as proud as if they were hard-won.

Suferin?a sfin?e?te totul.

La flatterie n'émane jamais des grandes âmes, elle est l'apanage des petits esprits qui réussissent à se rapetisser encore pour mieux entrer dans la sphère vitale de la personne autour de laquelle ils gravitent. La flatterie sous-entend un intérêt. (p.239/317)

Souvent, j'ai accompli de délicieux voyages, embarqué sur un mot ...

I haven't any objection to your thoroughly despising me, right now, because I'm convinced you'll come to love me. You'll find I have some tremendous abysses, some huge, focused emotions that fools think of as vices, but you'll never find me lazy, and you'll never find me ungrateful. In a word, I'm neither a pawn nor a bishop, my young friend, but a castle.

A line is a method of expressing the effect of light upon an object; but there are no lines in Nature, everything is solid. We draw by modeling, that is to say, that we disengage an object from its setting; the distribution of the light alone gives to a body the appearance by which we know it.

Life is a business transaction.

Misfortune is a kind of talisman whose virtue consists in its power to confirm our original nature; in some men it increases their distrust and malignancy, just as it improves the goodness of those who have a kind heart.

Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life, seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the midst of those domains of fancy, where the soul loves to give full rein to its wild creations.

She was white like the sands, tawny like the sands, solitary and burning like the sands.

Quand les enfants commencent à voir, ils sourient; quand une jeune fille entrevoit le sentiment dans la nature, elle sourit comme elle souriait enfant. Si la lumière est le premier amour de la vie, l'amour n'est-il pas la lumière du cœur?

We may scale cliffs; but to tramp forever in the mud is another thing.

So, my dear fellow, if I don't believe in God, I believe still less in man.

The faint hints of color in her complexion, her tawny blond hair, her extraordinary thinness, all spoke of that unearthly grace modern poets find in the medieval statues. Had she been happy, she'd have been ravishing: happiness constitutes pure poetry, for women.

Instead of inspiring the gallant attentions which other women seek, she made men dream,

She was, as you know already without as yet knowing anything, the Lily of this valley, where she grew for heaven, filling it with the fragrance of her virtues.

Mais que peuvent les malheureux? Ils aiment, voilà tout.

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.